UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal

While visual attention has been studied extensively, haptic attention has remained relatively unexplored. Haptic attention is an integral facet of everyday life, often arising in everyday activities like feeling for a pencil in a backpack or searching for keys in one’s pockets. We sought to understand how proprioception and features in objects contribute to the efficiency of bimanual haptic search in an unrestrained environment. The haptic task required participants to search for a target item among a set of distractor items without the use of vision, either in a single container, using hands together, or in separate containers with hands apart. We investigated whether the use of two hands enhanced or impeded search efficiency. The items to be felt were cylinders of varying length and volume. We found that bimanual search in one container was not appreciably different from bimanual search in two containers. We also found that there was an additive effect of diameter discrimination and length discrimination on search efficiency.