The explorative scanning movements of the hands have been compared to those of the eyes. The visual process is known to be composed of alternating phases of saccadic eye movements and fixation pauses. Descriptive results suggest that during the haptic exploration of objects short movement pauses occur as well.The goal of the present study was to detect these \"explorative stops\"(ES) during one-handed and two-handed haptic explorations of various objects and patterns, and to measure their duration. Additionally, the associations between the following variables were analyzed:(a) between mean exploration time and duration of ES, (b) between certain stimulus features and ES frequency, and (c) the duration of ES during the course of exploration.

The explorative scanning movements of the hands have been compared to those of the eyes. The visual process is known to be composed of alternating phases of saccadic eye movements and fixation pauses. Descriptive results suggest that during the haptic exploration of objects short movement pauses occur as well.The goal of the present study was to detect these \"explorative stops\"(ES) during one-handed and two-handed haptic explorations of various objects and patterns, and to measure their duration. Additionally, the associations between the following variables were analyzed:(a) between mean exploration time and duration of ES, (b) between certain stimulus features and ES frequency, and (c) the duration of ES during the course of exploration.:Introduction; Materials and methods; Results; Discussion