Are You Haptical?

All humanity may be divided into three groups: 1) hapticals, 2) visuals, and 3) in-betweens. So says Professor Viktor Lowenfeld, an eminent Viennese psychologist now at Hampton Institute in Virginia, who in 1939 deeply impressed artists with a book offering a new theory about The Nature of Creative Activity. Professor Lowenfeld explains that visuals are people who think of objects primarily in terms of what they see; hapticals, in terms of the sense of touch and kinesthetic (muscular) sensations.

The professor made this discovery while studying the drawings and sculptures of blind children. Most of them, he noticed, exaggerated the size of the hands (see cut) and emphasized straining muscles. But Lowenfeld found that this haptic* quality was not confined to blind people, and that not all blind people had it. He concluded that hapticals and visuals are born, not made.

A visual feels lost in the dark, has difficulty recognizing objects by sense of touch, but excels in visualizing details. A haptical, though no less imaginative than a visual, tends to think in more abstract terms, is better at mechanical jobs, has an acute sense of the bodily results of his behavior (e.g., a haptical pilot is more sensitive to turns in flight).

Because he believes it very important in choosing an occupation. Professor Lowenfeld has developed a test (which the U.S. Air Forces is using) to help you find out whether you are haptical or visual. Items: when asked to draw a chess board on a table, hapticals draw a player's view of the board and table top, visuals draw the whole thing in perspective, showing the table's legs. In a word association test, to the word "climbing" visuals are apt to respond: "mountain"; hapticals: "hard." Asked to think of the number of floors in a familiar building, visuals picture it from the outside, hapticals mentally climb its stairs.

Summing up his findings in the American Journal of Psychology, Lowenfeld reports on the basis of 1,128 tests that one person in four is a haptical, two are visuals, the other is in-between.

* From the Greek haptikos -- meaning able to lay hold of.

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