Individual differences in the vibrotactile perception of a "simple" pattern set

Discriminative capacities for vibrotactile spatiotemporal patterns were examined in 62 college students with three tasks: identification, masking, and discrimination of the letters "X" and "O" presented tactually on the Optacon, a reading machine for blind persons. Individual differences in performance and interrelations among scores within and across paradigms were explored. In identification, most persons quickly achieved consistently better than 90% performance, but others failed to identify the patterns above 80%, even after prolonged training. The same performance variance was found when the task was repeated by 23 Naval student pilots. Masking and discrimination measured susceptibility to interference when patterns followed one another closely in time. The resulting functions were typical, with poorest performance at short stimulus onset asynchronies. Again, a wide range of performance was seen. Individual performance, however, appeared to be consistent across tasks, suggesting that abilities in a variety of pattern-perception tasks might be predictable.