Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of human haptic perception. Discussed are, in particular, the perception of object properties such as curvature, shape, size, length, volume, and weight, and the perception of spatial properties, such as two-dimensional shape, spatial patterns, and orientations. Haptic perceptual performance of humans is mostly expressed in terms of discrimination thresholds. In addition, it will be shown that human haptic performance is often not veridical, although the deviations are systematic and not random. The study of such haptic illusions provides useful insights about how the information from the world around us is processed. Gestalt principles have hardly been investigated in touch, but some studies on proximity, similarity, and good continuation will also be discussed, as in visual perception these have led to valuable knowledge of perceptual organization.