Individual differences in the vibrotactile perception of a “simple” pattern set

Abstract

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.

Specification of Individuality in Causal Relationships among Texture-related Attributes, Emotions, and Preferences

“…All three groups tested in this study included the same types of nodes in the bottom-or psychophysical-layer, indicating that the variance across people at this basic sensory level is minimal. Nonetheless, as suggested in earlier studies [1,16,22], individuality should not be neglected even in this layer. Compared with the bottom layer, the contents of the middle and higher layers varied significantly between groups A and B.…”

A first look at individuals' affective ratings of vibrations

“…A recently developed scale ('Need for Touch' (NFT)) assesses individual differences in extracting and using haptic information for everyday pleasure or utility evaluation [20]). Tactile task performance, employed as an indicator of tactile memory and processing resources, also can vary considerably across subjects [17,5,7]; are functional touch ability and hedonic preferences linked?…”

Electrotactile perception of scatterplots on the fingertips and abdomen

“…We wanted to establish a task that would be reasonably challenging and would possibly be relevant to the correlation estimation task, without being so similar as necessarily to provide training for that task. Simple tactile perceptual discriminations (such as X from O) have been shown to correlate with other tactile perceptual tasks (CHOLEWIAK et al, 1997). In our study, we decided to use a structurally similar, but slightly larger, stimulus set: the digits 0-9 (in block format, stroke width ----1 electrode).…”