University Honors

Haptic perception is the ability to understand the world through touch. It is a fundamental sensory process that allows individuals to gather information about objects through physical interaction. Humans rely on tactile input such as texture, weight, temperature, and shape to interpret their surroundings, often in situations where visual information is limited or unavailable. Research in haptic perception has significant implications in learning how effectively we can perform tactile based tasks and further significance in clinical applications. Findings suggest that incorporating haptic technology, robotic or non-robotic, supports improvements in motor control and sensorimotor function in therapeutic settings. Medical and dental education settings have begun to use haptics to improve essential hands-on skills such as stitching simulators. (Pacheco-Barrios et al., 2024). In my personal experience, I have applied haptic perception to decision-making while shadowing an oncologist, particularly through the use of palpation to feel and identify lumps in breast cancer patients. As an aspiring future dental student, I am excited to further explore how I can apply the knowledge I have learned throughout this study of haptics to my continuing education. In the presented study, we explored a specific area of haptic perception known as haptic category learning. Category learning refers to the cognitive process by which individuals group stimuli based on shared features or underlying rules. In standard category learning tasks, individuals actively construct and adjust hypotheses to determine how categories are defined. (Schwarzer et al., 1999). People interpret the world by recognizing similarities and differences among objects, which allows them to group those objects into categories (Medin and Schaffer 1978). The current study aims to investigate whether individuals can use haptic search to accurately categorize two pipes based on differences in length. Pipes were grouped into the same category if they were both either less than one inch long or greater than one inch long. In contrast, the two pipes were considered to belong to different categories when one measured less than one inch and the other measured more than one inch. Participants were instructed to state ìsameî or ìdifferentî depending on whether they believed the pipes were in the same or different category respectively. Are individuals able to accurately guess ìsameî or ìdifferentî depending on their ability to accurately categorize the pipes using haptics? The following paper presents significant results regarding the way individuals process and assess similarities and differences in length.