Researchers Offer Insight Into How Brain Understands Data Gathered From Fingers
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What if the touchscreen of your smartphone or tablet could touch you back? Roberta Klatzky, the Charles J. Queenan Jr. Professor of Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, is part of a research team whose findings provide insight into how the brain makes sense of data gathered from fingers. Their results could have wide-ranging implications for how users interact with touch-based technologies.
In a study of people drawing their fingers over a flat surface containing virtual bumps, researchers from CMU and Northwestern University found that under certain circumstances the subjects felt only one bump when there were really two. Better yet, the researchers can explain why the brain comes to this conclusion.
Their article, to be published the week of Feb. 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), describes a new mathematical model and experimental results on haptic illusions that could one day lead to flat-screen displays featuring active touchback technology, such as making your touchscreen's keyboard actually feel like a keyboard. Tactile information also could benefit the blind, users of dashboard technology in cars, players of video games and more.
"How does your body and mind interpret something flat and 'see' it as having shape and texture?" Klatzky asked. "An important step toward effective surface haptics is to understand what kinds of stimulation might lead you to feel something other than uniform flatness when you touch the surface of your device. Our study contributes to this understanding."
Click here to read about the study's findings.