Size changes from study to test affect subsequent old/new recognition of novel and familiar objects in the visual modality (e.g. Jolicouer, 1987; Biederman & Cooper, 1992; Uttl, Graf, & Siegenthaler, 2007). Size changes also disrupted haptic and visual old/new recognition of 2D, novel, symbolic stimuli (Srinivas, Green, & Easton, 1997). However, no experiments have examined how size changes might affect haptic recognition of real, 3D familiar objects. Size may be a more important cue for haptics than for vision, since it is not confounded with distance. Two experiments compared size effects on visual and haptic old/new recognition of familiar objects. The first experiment presented greyscale photographs of real 3D objects. The second experiment presented the real 3D objects haptically. In both experiments, participants first named one of three (standard, different size, and different shape) exemplars of 36 categories of object. Second, old/new recognition was assessed for the standard exemplars from each of the 36 old, studied categories and for 25 new object categories. Changes in size or shape disrupted both visual and haptic old/new object recognition to a similar extent, indicating similarity between the two modalities.