Aging and haptic shape discrimination: the effects of variations in size

Seventy-two older and younger adults haptically discriminated the solid shape of natural objects (bell peppers, Capsicum annuum). Plastic copies of the original-sized fruits were used as experimental stimuli, as well as copies that were reduced in size to 1/8th and 1/27th of the original object volumes. If haptic object shape is represented in a part-based manner, then haptic shape discrimination performance should be at least partly size invariant, since changes only in scale do not affect an object’s constituent parts. On any given trial, participants sequentially explored two bell pepper replicas and were required to judge whether they possessed the same shape or had different shapes. For some participants, the objects to be discriminated possessed the same size, while for others, the two objects had different sizes. It was found that variations in scale did significantly reduce the participants’ haptic sensitivities to shape. Nevertheless, the discrimination performance obtained for large variations in size was no lower than that obtained for smaller variations in size. The results also demonstrated that increases in age modestly affect haptic shape discrimination performance: the d′ values of the older participants were 15.5% lower than those of the younger participants.