Tactile vibrations are potentially useful in a variety of environments to communicate information to visually and auditorily overloaded people. However, since vibrotactile signals must come into physical contact with the skin, they may also be perceived as highly urgent and annoying. The current study examined whether scalable levels of perceived urgency could be obtained with tactile signals by measuring the relationship between changes in vibrotactile pulse rate and ratings of urgency and annoyance. In two separate experiments, changes in pulse rate resulted in changes in ratings of perceived urgency with faster pulse rates being perceived as more urgent. Importantly, in both studies pulse rate had a greater impact on perceived urgency than it did on annoyance suggesting that scalable levels of urgency can be achieved without similarly annoying operators. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for multimodal display design.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.