Summary: The purpose of the present experiment was to analyse the metric of haptic space. The subjects were shown a goal-point, after having felt the sides of a right triangle with differing lengths. The subjects were then required to estimate the position of the goal-point in one of two ways, either along the hypotenuse from the starting point (a cognitive spatial orientation task) or via the sides touched previously (a perceptual spatial orientation task). They were asked to do this either by making a hand movement which would approximate the distance (motor estimate) or verbally (verbal estimate). There were four groups of subjects: congenitally blind (CB), adventitiously blind (AB), sighted under blindfold (SB), and sighted people with visual pre-orientation (SV). 10 subjects were in each group. The major results of the experiment were: (1) With all groups but SV a distortion was observed in the estimates of the shortest distance from the Euclidian metric to the city-block-metric. (2) The groups AB and SB produced the largest distortion from the Euclidian metric. (3) In the case of motor estimates, both cognitive and perceptual spatial orientation tasks led to congruent metrics. (4) With the exception of group SV verbal and motor estimates led to divergent metrics. The results are considered from the points of view of (a) empiricist theories, (b) theories of equal laws of structure for all sensory modalities, and (c) the hypothesis of transposition.

EXPLOR_STEP=$WICRI_ROOT/Ticri/CIDE/explor/HapticV1/Data/Main/Exploration

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_STEP/biblio.hfd -nk 00A030 | SxmlIndent | more

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Main/Exploration/biblio.hfd -nk 00A030 | SxmlIndent | more

{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Ticri/CIDE
   |area=    HapticV1
   |flux=    Main
   |étape=   Exploration
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     ISTEX:41A1F804595A7959389C932A45AEBAE0D0F3E350
   |texte=   The structure of haptic space in the blind and sighted
}}