Agnès Lacreuse, Joël Fagot, Jacques Vauclair
This paper reports a novel approach to investigate exploratory strategies and hemispheric lateralization in haptic perception. The duration and spatial distribution of digital contacts on the stimulus were studied in four mono- or dihaptic tasks. In dihaptic conditions, the left hand touched a larger surface of the stimuli, and was better at recognition than the right hand. In monohaptic testing, a similar asymmetry was observed in strategies, although the two hands did not differ on their success rates. The use of a monohaptic tactile-tactile situation suggests that asymmetries were more likely to appear during the initial coding of the stimulus than during its recognition. Altogether, these experiments show that the analysis of exploratory strategies is more suited to demonstrate hemispheric asymmetries than the analysis of response times and success rates.