Development and Evaluation of a Device for Presenting Tactile Stimuli

We are especially interested in the human ability to recognize shape using the delayed matching paradigm in active and passive touch studies. To investigate the characteristics of shape recognition, stimulus presentation control is very important because a subtle difference in the stimulus presentation will influence the results. In this study, we propose a new device that precisely controls the stimulus presentation and performs psychobehavioral measurements in haptics studies. And we also conducted an active/passive shape discrimination experiment to evaluate the performance of the device. Twenty right-handed students consented to participate in the experiment. The results suggest that the device might serve as a comprehensive haptic device that allows different types of haptic stimuli to be presented precisely to subjects to measure various psychobehavioral parameters.