Some information is sensory specific, for example, colour to vision and temperature to touch. But most is perceived by several senses. An example is shape. Shape is perceived by vision, touch, and hearing. It transfers between the senses. And when used together, the senses perceive supplementary and overlapping information. (See our blog for Crossmodal correspondences between the senses, Vision, haptic touch, and hearing, and Multisensory processing).
In this post, I have invited the research team behind TOUCH to shed some light on how sighted people use their sense of touch when exploring real objects. The blog post is written by Dr Lisa Bowers, Open University, Professor Andrew Manches, University of Edinburgh, and Professor Laura Colucci-Gray, University of Edinburgh. Here, they present their previous research, leading up to TOUCH, on the role of touch when sighted children learn about nature.
Given the worsening state of our planet, an important challenge for education is how to support and promote a renovated relationship between humans and the natural world. Whilst schools offer an ideal context for this challenge, current teaching approaches tend to emphasise children’s visual experiences, exaggerated through increased engagement with screen devices: the world is presented as if ‘at a distance’, disconnected from everyday experiences and the matters we deeply care about. Although an education through the senses is predicated to support various hands-on initiatives, including outdoor and play-based experiences, its role is typically conceived as a means to actively explore visual information, rather than holding any intrinsic value in its own right.
Our research team has examined the role of touch in how children interacted with and described a selection of nature objects (e.g., a leaf, a shell, and a feather). We have found three key dimensions:
- Propensity to Touch. Children differ in how much prompting the
y need to physically pick up objects – ranging from those who immediately touch objects to those who are reluctant even with prompting. - Touch interaction. Children differ in the
© University of Edinburgh richness of their touch interaction – from simple tapping to rich exploration using both hands.
- Touch communication. Children differ in the extent to which they use tactile language in their description of objects, as well as how they simulate touch through gesture when describing what they see.
As well as revealing intriguing similarities and differences between children, our research has highlighted the way that touch wasn’t simply a means for children to visually explore objects (although this was important, e.g., manipulating objects to inspect them from all angles) but offered much value as a unique mode of interaction. Indeed, many children would look away from objects whilst exploring them through touch. For example, a child might rub the inside and outside of the shell whilst reflecting on why one was smooth and the other rough and this process would recall prior experiences in other places or in the company of significant others – often positive emotional recollections.
Our research also revealed challenges children often had in describing tactile properties of objects – often drawing on analogies with other touch experiences when they lacked vocabulary. The identification of gestures simulating touch was particularly powerful in revealing how children had internalised touch experiences in their concepts of objects as they described them. This internalisation of sensory experience in conceptual thinking is a key claim of embodied theories of cognition. However, the benefits of tactile learning extend beyond basic sensory exploration. Somatosensory perception is central to early human development and the explicit incorporation of touch as a way to feel, interact, and communicate through the body can enhance learning, with increased engagement and memorability.
The foundational work of research studies such as the one described above has highlighted various possible avenues for design – including ways to encourage children’s propensity to touch, ways to encourage children’s exploration of tactile properties in greater depth, or ways to develop children’s tactile language (and possibly gestures) as a means to communicate tactile properties. We have explored some of these opportunities through classroom and outdoor activities, as well as the development of haptic prototype designs where children receive haptic feedback from a special stylus moved over a screen device. For these haptic designs, tactile feedback not only provides a means for children to tactilely explore ‘less accessible’ objects like a bee or unfamiliar plant, but can prime children to be more curious about the feel of real-world natural objects. We are also exploring the potential of this work to quantify the role of touch in order to examine how different factors influence children’s touch interaction and communication (e.g., their age, confidence or nature experiences), and to evaluate how, and if, our interventions influence the role of children’s touch in children’ science learning.
In our future research, touch is conceived of as a medium that builds on human capacities to feel and perceive what might be distant and inaccessible, but also to pay attention to aspects of the world that may go unnoticed or taken for granted. We are now asking ourselves and all we are engaging with a key question – what is the role of touch in what it means to be curious about, explore, think, feel, communicate, and be connected to our natural world?
See our blog for Activities; especially 62-64.
