The effects of perceptual priming on 4-year-olds' haptic-to-visual cross-modal transfer.

Four-year-old children often have difficulty visually recognizing objects that were previously experienced only haptically. This experiment attempts to improve their performance in these haptic-to-visual transfer tasks. Sixty-two 4-year-old children participated in priming trials in which they explored eight unfamiliar objects visually, haptically, or visually and haptically together. Subsequently, all children participated in the same haptic-to-visual cross-modal transfer task. In this task, children haptically explored the objects that were presented in the priming phase and then visually identified a match from among three test objects, each matching the object on only one dimension (shape, texture, or color). Children in all priming conditions predominantly made shape-based matches; however, the most shape-based matches were made in the Visual and Haptic condition. All kinds of priming provided the necessary memory traces upon which subsequent haptic exploration could build a strong enough representation to enable subsequent visual recognition. Haptic exploration patterns during the cross-modal transfer task are discussed and the detailed analyses provide a unique contribution to our understanding of the development of haptic exploratory procedures.