Discriminably different sounds, concurrently presented from the left and right of the medial plane, were reduced in angular separation until subjects could no longer detect which sound was "left" and which was "right." The procedure was repeated with hearing masked and judgments made on the basis of the tactile signals at two fingertip vibrators that received their inputs from two miniature microphones bilaterally located on the subject's head. Auditory and tactile performance were compared under active (head movements permitted) and passive (head held still) conditions. Active and passive performance were not significantly different. Auditory and tactile performance became no better than chance at angular separations of 2.7°and 4.4°, respectively. Touch compared sufficiently well with audition to support arguments for the inclusion of sound localization information in devices which use the skin as a substitute for the ear.
least a limited perception of speech.A wearable twenty-channel electrotactile vocoder was used to transform audio speech stimuli into tactile patterns via a linear display on the abdomen, analogous to a frequency-to-spatial transform with increased resolution in the F2 region. A two-choice discrimination task, with simultaneous auditory and tactile feedback, was used to train and test hearing subjects on the tactile discrimination of monosyllabic words having minimal phonemic differences. In subsequent studies, the perception of words embedded in sentences and in connected discourse was tested. Results, and implications for the processing of speech information via the tactile mode, will be discussed.
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