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Human haptic perception is interrupted by explorative stops of milliseconds
Martin Grunwald1, Manivannan Muniyandi2, Hyun Kim3
1Haptic-Research Laboratory, Paul-Flechsig-Institute for Brain Research, University of Leipzig Leipzig, Germany.
Frontiers in Psychology
|May 1, 2014
Summary
Researchers identified "explorative stops" (ES) during hand movements when exploring objects, similar to eye pauses. These stops vary in duration and occur at specific object features, suggesting they are a fundamental part of haptic exploration.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Robotics
Background:
- Haptic exploration involves hand movements analogous to visual saccades and fixations.
- Previous research suggested short pauses during haptic object exploration.
- The study aimed to identify and quantify these
Purpose of the Study:
- To detect and measure the duration of "explorative stops" (ES) during one-handed and two-handed haptic exploration.
- To analyze associations between exploration time and ES duration.
- To investigate the relationship between stimulus features and ES frequency.
Main Methods:
- Five experiments were conducted, including recognition tasks of haptic stimuli and real/virtual objects.
- The PHANToM haptic device was utilized for exploring virtual and real sunken reliefs.
- Explorative stops (ES) and their durations were measured during these tasks.
Main Results:
- Explorative stops (ES) were observed across all experiments with varying average durations (67.47 ms to 329.50 ms).
- Significant correlations were found between overall exploration time and the duration of ES.
- ES occurred more frequently at stimulus features like corners and endpoints, but not invariably.
Conclusions:
- Explorative stops (ES) are proposed as a general characteristic of human haptic exploration.
- The study's findings are interpreted using the Hypotheses-Rebuild-Model and Limited Capacity Control System theory.
- ES likely play a role in information processing during tactile object interaction.
