Experiments in Tactual Perception

Résumé du livre

This report describes basic studies on tactile perception and communication. In Section II are described experimental sessions in which words, sentences, and paragraphs were transmitted to subjects by a tactile display. Sessions in which a specially designed tactile alphabet was developed are discussed in Section III. Factors such as learnability, edge effects, letter packing, and number of fingers used are considered. Tactually naive subjects were able to identify these letters correctly at a rate of two random letters a second after 25 hours of practice. In Section IV, studies of two-dimensional compensatory tracking with a continuous visual display, a discrete visual display, and a discrete tactile display are described. Finally, in Section VI three series of quantitative studies are reported. The first is a study of the effect of deliberate stimulus pattern 'jitter' on performance. Next, a study concerned with methods of tactually transmitting the magnitude of a single analog parameter is described. Third, the theory of signal detection is applied to a study of the human observer's ability to discriminate among different loci of tactual stimulation.