Can passive touch be better than active touch? A comparison of active and passive tactile maze learning.

In a comparison of the performance of active (n=15) and passive (n=15) mechanically yoked subjects who learned their way through a tactile maze, it was shown that active subjects mad more errors and took a greater number of trials to reach criterion than did passive subjects. In addition, the difference between active and passive performance was largely accounted for by the greater number of repeated errors made by active subjects. In a second experiment it was found that the poorer performance of active subjects could be attributed to the interfering effects of decisions about which way to move. However, the responsibility for the production of movement had no effect on performance. it was argued that the results reflected limits to the cognitive system, not the haptic system.