The influence of picture size on recognition and exploratory behaviour in raised-line drawings.

We demonstrate the influence of picture size on haptic recognition and exploratory behaviour. The stimuli were raised-line drawings of everyday objects. Participants were instructed to think aloud during haptic exploration of the pictures.

Look what I have felt: unidentified haptic line drawings are identified after sketching.

The difficulty that observers experience when trying to identify a raised line drawing by touch is still largely unexplained. In this article, we show that observers who are unable to haptically identify a raised line drawing are suddenly able to do so after they have sketched on paper what they have in their mind. We conducted three experiments: first of all we show that this effect is robust; in the second experiment, we show that identification-after-sketching is caused by visual inspection of the sketch, and not caused by feedback in general; and in the third we show that sketches which were identified by the observers who produced them, were also identified by completely naive viewers.