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Visual and Haptic Perception

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Encyclopedia of Geropsychology

Synonyms

Vision; Active Touch

Definition

People perceive objects (their shape, size, & motion) in the environment through their senses of vision and active touch.

Introduction

Humans and other animals obtain knowledge about objects in their environment through a variety of distinct sensory modalities. Common modalities throughout the animal kingdom would include, but are not limited to, vision, audition, touch, and olfaction. An animal’s survival obviously depends upon such sensory modalities, because without them it would be impossible to locate food objects, navigate safely, make and utilize tools, find potential mates, etc. This review will focus on the senses of vision and touch – one reason for this is that vision and touch are the only sensory modalities by which humans reliably perceive the 3-dimensional (3-D) shape of environmental objects. Other mammals, such as dolphins, can use their sense of echolocation (in addition to vision) to perceive the shape of 3-D objects. A...

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Correspondence to J. Farley Norman .

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore

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Norman, J.F. (2016). Visual and Haptic Perception. In: Pachana, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geropsychology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_236-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-080-3_236-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-981-287-080-3

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