Visio-haptic Cross-modal Recognition for Fabrics

There are many opportunities for visual and tactile interactions with fabrics in daily life, and there have been many studies on visual and tactile evaluation of fabrics. However, there are few studies of how the visual and tactile stimuli influence the recognition of fabrics based on short-term memory. This study examines how the memory of fabric texture is retained and is transferred between visual and haptic perceptions by intra- and inter-modal recognition experiments. Fabric was recognized under both haptic and visual single-modal conditions. Visual recognition was superior to haptic recognition under single-modal conditions, consisting of visual learning followed by a visual test and haptic learning followed by haptic test. The inter-modal experiment showed that the cross-modal recognition of fabric was possible, regardless of the order of encoding and recalling fabrics by touch or visually. Therefore, single common cross-modal representation is used when fabrics are recognized.