The Effect of Movement and Cue Complexity on Tactile Change Detection

Abstract

There is a growing interest in using touch to offload the often overburdened visual channel as its merit has been demonstrated in various work domains. However, more work is needed to understand the perceptual limitations of the tactile modality, including how it is affected by change blindness (i.e., failure to detect changes due to transients) as the majority of work on change blindness has been in vision. This study examines how movement and cue complexity affects the ability to detect tactile changes. The findings indicate the ability to detect changes are affected by: 1) movement (walking resulted in worse change detection rates compared to sitting) and 2) cue complexity (high complexity cues had worse change detection rates compared to low complexity). Overall, this work adds to the knowledge base of tactile perception and can inform the design of tactile displays for multiple work domains such as anesthesiology.