ABSTRACT
A question of continuing interest within the study of haptic perception is the possible commonality between the two populations that use external appendages to guide their movement. Many mammals, such as rats and mice, use vibrissae to navigate in the dark, while blind persons sometimes use canes to explore their environments. What vibrissae and canes have in common is that they are solid and external. One of the interesting differences is rigidity. The canes used by blind persons are relatively solid; in fact, the rigidity of the probe is often a criterion in recommendations for ideal canes. Even scaled to the smaller size of the animal, vibrissae are nonrigid and flexible, more like a brush than a solid tool. This differential flexibility is a possible impediment to applying variables in cane-aided locomotion to explain whiskered locomotion, and vice-versa. The current experiments continue an attempt to determine just how much of a problem is posed by this flexibility.
