Unimodal and Multi-Modal Perception of Cellular Phones: A Multidimensional Scaling Study

Previous studies suggest that subjects gain modality-specific information across vision and tactile (Newell, Ernst, Tjan, & Bülthoff, 2001) and form a coherent percept (Ernst & Bülthoff, 2004). This study explored potential difference in perceiving real-world objects (cellular phones) uni-modally (visual or haptic) and bimodally. In phase 1, subjects provided verbal descriptions of 9 different phones while interacting in a visual, haptic, or cross-modal manner. In phase 2, a new group of subjects performed a card-sorting task using on the descriptions obtained in phase 1, with the instructions to sort descriptions based on similarity. A multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis was applied to similarity matrices produced in phase 2. Stress values for MDS fits of varying dimensionality were similar for haptic, visual, and bimodal conditions, suggesting that different inspection conditions produced mental representations of similar complexity. Inspection of 2D plots of descriptors across the three condition suggests that dimensions of usability and style. Results imply that people extract largely redundant information across different sensory modalities while evaluating cellular phones.