Perceiving Roughness via a Rigid Probe: Effects of Exploration Speed
Abstract This study investigates the psychophysical consequences for roughness perception of altering the speed with which textured surfaces are explored using a rigid probe. Two ranges of probe speed are used: a 4-fold change (Experiment 1) and a 10-fold change (Experiment 2). The data are examined in terms of the effects of speed upon the psychophysical roughness functions (i.e., perceived roughness as a function of interelement spacing). In addition, we perform a global comparison of the relative magnitude of haptic speed effects across current and previous experiments, using a new measure that we derive here. We discover that roughness constancy declines as the range of speed is reduced, sometimes quite substantially so. The results are considered as well in terms of their implications for producing and exploring simulated textures with haptic interfaces for teleoperation and virtual-environment systems. While we most often touch objects directly with our bare hands, we also frequently use intermediary links such as tools to bring about such interactions. In this paper, we report the results of two psychophysical experiments that extend our recent work (Klatzky & Lederman, 1999; Lederman & Klatzky, 1999) on how people perceive surface roughness via rigid probes. The current experiments investigate the effects of probe speed on roughness perception under active exploration. A more comprehensive paper, which also includes comparable results for passive touch (the surfaces are moved across a stationary probe), has been submitted1. In addition to their contribution to psychophysical issues pertaining to the sense of touch, the results are also relevant to the preparation and exploration of synthetic texture information by means of haptic interfaces for teleoperator and virtual-environment systems.