In July, our touch research went to Siena, Italy, for EuroHaptics 2026, the main international conference on the science and technology of touch, held from 6 to 9 July.
The lab presented three posters from the Tactome Project, all exploring how we perceive and learn about objects through touch, and how this changes as we get older:
Exploring haptic and visual 2D shape discrimination in young and older adults
Alan O’Dowd and Fiona Newell compared how well younger and older adults can tell shapes apart by touch and by sight.
Ageing and 3D haptic shape discrimination: Exploring compensatory strategies through motion tracking
Kate Nevin, I. Camponogara and Fiona Newell used hand tracking to look at how older adults explore 3D objects with their hands, and whether they adapt their movements to make up for age-related changes in touch.
Haptic category learning and cross-modal transfer of 3D object representations
Martina Seveso, Alan O’Dowd, Rebecca Hirst, Canaan Tsabary, N. Sánchez Fitzpatrick and Fiona Newell looked at how people learn new object categories by touch, and whether that knowledge carries over to vision.