Museums visitors touch artworks they should not. We touch our phone on the table, even though we don’t need it. Why do we want to touch objects that we can clearly see? What is it that touch provides that vision does not?
Our new hypothesis here is that we are more confident after touching rather than seeing an object, even when we are not de facto more precise or accurate. We call this a ‘Saint Thomas effect’, in reference to Thomas who doubted the return of Christ until he touched him.
At this stage we are:
- Testing whether and how this confidence bias shows across a variety of tasks
- Examining how our account explains the idea, found in philosophy and in common sense, that touch is ‘more objective’ than the other senses
- Extending these findings to clinical studies (compulsive fact-checking by touch) and technology (is pressing buttons is more satisfying than simply selecting on a screen) New Paragraph
Publications
Deroy, O., & Fairhurst, M. (2019). Spatial Certainty. In Chen, Deroy & Spence (eds). Spatial Senses: Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science. London : Routledge.
Fairhurst, M. T., Travers, E., Hayward, V., & Deroy, O. (2018). Confidence is higher in touch than in vision in cases of perceptual ambiguity. Nature Scientific reports, 8(1), 15604
Deroy, O. (2017). Why you need to touch your keys. Aeon Online Magazine, https://aeon.co/ideas/why-you-need-to-touch-your-keys-to-believe-theyre-in-your-bag
Team
Collaborator