Viewpoint dependence in visual and haptic object recognition

On the whale, people recognize objects best when they see the objects from a familiar view and worse when they see the objects from views that were pr eviously occluded from sight. Unexpectedly, we found haptic object recognit ion to be viewpoint-specific as well, even though hand movements were unres tricted. This viewpoint dependence was due to the hands preferring the back "view" of the objects. Furthermore, when the sensory modalities (visual vs . haptic) differed between learning an object and recognizing it, recogniti on performance was best when the objects were rotated back-to-front between learning and recognition. Our data indicate that the visual system recogni zes the front view of objects best, whereas the hand recognizes objects bes t from the back.