Relative advantage of touch over vision in the exploration of texture

Texture segmentation is an effortless process in scene analysis, yet its mechanisms have not been sufficiently understood. A common assumption in most current approaches is that texture segmentation is a vision problem. However, considering that texture is basically a surface property, this assumption can at times be misleading. One interesting possibility is that texture may be more intimately related with touch than with vision. Recent neurophysiological findings showed that receptive fields for touch resemble that of vision, albeit with some subtle differences. To leverage on this, we tested how such distinct properties in tactile receptive fields can affect texture segmentation performance, as compared to that of visual receptive fields. Our main results suggest that touch has an advantage over vision in texture processing. We expect our findings to shed new light on the role of tactile perception of texture and its interaction with vision, and help develop more powerful, biologically inspired texture segmentation algorithms.