Evaluating the Effect of Stimulus Duration on Vibrotactile Cue Localizability With a Tactile Sleeve

Vibrotactile arrays are appealing as wearable haptic devices, since designers can vary parameters including cue location and duration to create distinct haptic icons to represent a wide range of information. Vibrotactile sleeves have typically used cues that vary in duration from 100 to 400 ms, but it is not well understood how cue duration might affect localizability of stimuli. Using an experimental protocol typically employed to understand how our visual system can localize stimuli, we examined localization of tactile cues for tactors spaced at fixed locations along the forearm while we varied cue duration between 100 and 400 ms. To validate our experimental methods and hardware, we also evaluated visual cue localization performance. Our visual cue localization results were in agreement with prior experiments showing that varying noise in visual cues affects cue localization. More importantly, this experimental paradigm allowed us to verify that participants could successfully localize tactile cues regardless of duration. Response variance in tactile localizability was much greater than the visual case. There was also an effect of stimulus location on tactile localization performance. Our findings support the variation of tactile cue duration in the 100 to 400 ms range for tactile arrays positioned on the forearm.