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On Aug 14, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Morgan Sutherland wrote:

> [1] Stephen, I've been casually looking for a reference on the thresholds at which various human organs can distinguish between events in time. I recall being told that the skin can distinguish events at the sub-ms timescale, the ear at the ms timescale (though, it's complicated with tone formation), and the eyes at the 10 or 100-ms timescale. I suspect you've come across research like this before. 

Vibrotactile response at the fingertips is maximum 250hz.  Light touch is about 50hz and pressure is 5-15hz.  Visual flicker-fusion thresholds are nominally stated to be about 30hz but might be higher depending on conditions.  Hearing is kind of complicated because its sort of "cheating" by using the basilar membrane to do a spectral decomposition, so the frequency response is quite high but the temporal masking frequencies are actually rather slow.

Start here for some more details about touch sensation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanoreceptor

This is also a pretty interesting paper on the subject of vibrotactile sensing: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1166467

There is some research showing that audio-haptic multimodal integration is a stronger effect than audio-visual integration...  I think I've got a paper on that somewhere but I can't seem to find it at the moment (too much stuff!!)


---

Andy W. Schmeder
email: andy [at] cnmat.berkeley.edu
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