Objective monitoring of attentional states based on collaborative force-position control tasks

Abstract

Accurate haptic interaction tasks require intensive activation of attentional resources. Exploring the relation between haptic channel and attention is not only conducive to understanding the interaction mechanism between human perception and cognition but is also important for the design of brain-computer interaction system based on haptic modality. In this paper, we built a virtual reality environment incorporating the multiregion force feedback and immersive visual displays and developed a collaborative force-position control task to monitor the attentional states objectively based on this platform. The force and position control performances of users at four different difficulty levels were used to measure the attentional level and attentional spotlight. The users subjective assessment showed that the task can effectively activate attentional resources. The experimental results showed that the task can be used as an attentional oscilloscope to monitor the changes in the attentional level and target of attentional spotlight with a high temporal resolution, providing a behavioral ground truth for exploring attentional biomarkers.