The costs of changing modality in visuo-haptic recognition of scenes

The experiment is aimed at investigating the factors that may modulate the costs of cross-modal visuo-haptic recognition of scenes. Participants learned a scene either visually or by touch (in the latter case they were blindfolded); then, following a delay, they identified the scene using the same or changed modality. The level of difficulty was adjusted by introducing two or three changes in the placement of scene elements at the recognition stage. It has been demonstrated that the costs of modality change, related to both decreased accuracy of recognition and extended time for making decision, occur only in a situation when a significant burden is imposed on working memory, i.e., with tactile learning of a scene and a high level of difficulty of the recognition task.