Haptic saliency

Humans can distinguish many object and surface properties by touch. Some of these properties are highly salient: they are immediately perceived after just a brief touch. Since the processing of such features is apparently highly efficient, it is of interest to investigate which features are salient to touch and which are not. In vision, there already exists a large body of literature concerning salient features (e.g., Itti, 2007). A typical way to investigate visual saliency is by means of a search task (e.g., Treisman and Gelade, 1980; Treisman and Gormican, 1988; Wolfe and Horowitz, 2008). Here, we will describe this search task, its adaptations to haptic research and give an overview of the features that are salient to touch.