Perceiving Roughness via a Rigid Probe: Effects of Exploration Speed

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. L. Klatzky ◽  
S. J. Lederman ◽  
C. Hamilton ◽  
G. Ramsay

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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. e1008848
Author(s):  
Chang Xu ◽  
Yuxiang Wang ◽  
Gregory J. Gerling

Our sense of touch helps us encounter the richness of our natural world. Across a myriad of contexts and repetitions, we have learned to deploy certain exploratory movements in order to elicit perceptual cues that are salient and efficient. The task of identifying optimal exploration strategies and somatosensory cues that underlie our softness perception remains relevant and incomplete. Leveraging psychophysical evaluations combined with computational finite element modeling of skin contact mechanics, we investigate an illusion phenomenon in exploring softness; where small-compliant and large-stiff spheres are indiscriminable. By modulating contact interactions at the finger pad, we find this elasticity-curvature illusion is observable in passive touch, when the finger is constrained to be stationary and only cutaneous responses from mechanosensitive afferents are perceptible. However, these spheres become readily discriminable when explored volitionally with musculoskeletal proprioception available. We subsequently exploit this phenomenon to dissociate relative contributions from cutaneous and proprioceptive signals in encoding our percept of material softness. Our findings shed light on how we volitionally explore soft objects, i.e., by controlling surface contact force to optimally elicit and integrate proprioceptive inputs amidst indiscriminable cutaneous contact cues. Moreover, in passive touch, e.g., for touch-enabled displays grounded to the finger, we find those spheres are discriminable when rates of change in cutaneous contact are varied between the stimuli, to supplant proprioceptive feedback.


1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan J. Lederman ◽  
Roberta L. Klatzky

This article reports a variety of sensory and perceptual consequences of eliminating, via a rigid fingertip sheath, the spatially distributed fingertip force information that is normally available during tactile and haptic sensing. Sensory measures included tactile spatial acuity, tactile force, and vibrotactile thresholds. Suprathreshold tasks included perception of roughness, perception of 2-D edge orientation, and detection of a simulated 3-D mass in simulated tissue via fingertip palpation. Of these performance measures, only vibrotactile thresholds and texture perception failed to show substantial impairment. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for the future design of haptic interfaces for teleoperator and virtual environment systems.


1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Verry

Susan Lederman (SL) is an invited member of the International Council of Research Fellows for the Braille Research Center and a Fellow of he Canadian Psychology Association. She was also an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Programme for 8 years. A Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Computing & Information Science at Queen's University at Kingston (Ontario, Canada), she has written and coauthored numerous articles on tactile psychophysics, haptic perception and cognition, motor control, and haptic applications in robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. She is currently the coorganizer of the Annual Symposium a Haptic Interfaces for Teleoperation and Virtual Environment Systems. René Verry (RV) is a psychology professor at Millikin University (Decatur, IL), where she teaches a variety of courses in the experimental core, including Sensation and Perception. She chose the often-subordinated somatic senses as the focus of her interview, and recruited Susan Lederman as our research specialist.


Author(s):  
Levi C. Leishman ◽  
Daniel J. Ricks ◽  
Mark B. Colton

Compliant mechanisms have the potential to increase the performance of haptic interfaces by reducing the friction and inertia felt by the user. The net result is that the user feels the dynamic forces of the virtual environment, without feeling the dynamics of the haptic interface. This “transparency” typically comes at a cost — compliant mechanisms exhibit a return-to-zero behavior that must be compensated in software. This paper presents a step toward improving the situation by using statically balanced compliant mechanisms (SBCMs), which are compliant devices that do not exhibit the return-to-zero behavior typical with most compliant mechanisms. The design and construction of a prototype haptic device based on SBCMs is presented, along with its mathematical model derived using the pseudo-rigid body model (PRBM) approach. Experimental results indicate that SBCMs effectively eliminate the return-to-zero behavior and are a feasible design element in haptic interfaces.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Siripuk Ritnamkam ◽  
Yada Chavalkul

This study investigated what consumers’ feelings were evoked when they touched different textured surfaces of 20 compact powder cases. Without seeing them, fifty respondents with and without an art-and-design-based background were asked to describe their feelings in their words as they touched the cases as well as explain them by provided words. The results show that different surface textures did evoke different respondents’ feelings of which those familiar with the design were able to express a wider range. All participants were able to describe both the initial sense of physicality and complex feelings toward every textured surface investigated.© 2016. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.Keywords: sense of touch; textured surfaces; cosmetic packaging; consumers’ feelings


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