A Comparison of Kinesthetic-Tactual and Visual Displays via a Critical Tracking Task

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Abstract
The present study investigated the feasibility of using the critical tracking task to evaluate kinesthetic-tactual displays. Subjects attempted to control a first-order unstable system with a continuously decreasing time constant by using either visual or tactual unidimensional displays. In addition, display augmentation was introduced in both modalities in the form of velocity quickening. For these unoptimized displays, visual tracking performance was better than tactual tracking, and velocity quickening improved the critical tracking scores for visual and tactual tracking about equally. Comparing across modalities, tactually quickened tracking performance was approximately equal to visually unquickened tracking. The present results suggest that the critical task methodology holds considerable promise for evaluating kinesthetic-tactual displays and that tactual tracking performance under certain conditions may yield results comparable to those of visual tracking.

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