Texture and visual memory span capacities are dissociable

Experiencing and remembering objects using the sense of touch is an important aspect of our interactions with our environment, but the cognitive processes of long-term tactile memory for surface textures have not previously been studied. We administered a novel tactile texture memory span task, which required participants to identify new textures among a constantly increasing set of previously experienced stimuli. Performance on that task was compared to a span task employing novel visual objects. We found no correlation between participants' tactile texture span and visual span performance. Additionally, there was no correlation between participants' ability to name textures and their tactile texture span performance. These findings provide some initial evidence for a possible dissociation between long-term memory capacity for stimuli of different sensory modality, and for the mnemonic representation of texture information independent of verbal descriptors.