Imagined haptic exploration in judgments of object properties.

In Experiment 1, each subject rated a single, named object for its roughness, hardness, temperature, weight, size, or shape. In Experiment 2, each subject compared one pair of objects along the same dimensions. In both studies, a substantial proportion of subjects who judged the first four dimensions imagined a hand making exploratory movements appropriate for the designated information. The proportion of hand-exploration images decreased substantially when judging size or shape, or when judgments could be made readily through general semantic knowledge. The results suggest that the incorporation of haptic exploration into visual imagery provides access to information about haptically accessible object properties.