Correcting for Visuo-Haptic Biases in 3D Haptic Guidance

PLoS One. 2016 Jul 20;11(7):e0158709. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0158709. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Visuo-haptic biases are observed when bringing your unseen hand to a visual target. The biases are different between, but consistent within participants. We investigated the usefulness of adjusting haptic guidance to these user-specific biases in aligning haptic and visual perception. By adjusting haptic guidance according to the biases, we aimed to reduce the conflict between the modalities. We first measured the biases using an adaptive procedure. Next, we measured performance in a pointing task using three conditions: 1) visual images that were adjusted to user-specific biases, without haptic guidance, 2) veridical visual images combined with haptic guidance, and 3) shifted visual images combined with haptic guidance. Adding haptic guidance increased precision. Combining haptic guidance with user-specific visual information yielded the highest accuracy and the lowest level of conflict with the guidance at the end point. These results show the potential of correcting for user-specific perceptual biases when designing haptic guidance.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Female
  • Hand / physiology
  • Humans
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional
  • Male
  • Ocular Physiological Phenomena*
  • Photic Stimulation
  • Psychomotor Performance / physiology*
  • Touch Perception / physiology
  • Vision, Ocular / physiology*
  • Visual Perception / physiology*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, which is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and partly funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, under grant number 12157.