It's All in the Timing: Principles of Transient Distraction Illustrated with Vibrotactile Tasks

TL;DR

This study explores how timing and modality of unexpected stimuli affect the perception of vibrotactile signals, providing insights and guidelines for designing distraction-resistant haptic interfaces.

Contribution

It systematically investigates the effects of surprise distractors on vibrotactile perception and offers design principles for reducing distraction in haptic devices.

Findings

Distraction impairs detection at delays under 350 ms.

Performance recovers or improves at delays around 1050 ms.

Repeated exposure to vibrotactile distractors reduces their disruptive effect.

Abstract

Vibration is an efficient way of conveying information from a device to its user, and it is increasingly used for wrist or finger-worn devices such as smart rings. Unexpected vibrations or sounds from the environment may disrupt the perception of such information. Although disruptive effects have been systematically explored in vision and audition, they have been less examined in the haptic domain. Here we briefly review the relevant literature from HCI and psychology, distilling principles of when distraction is likely. We then investigate these principles through four experiments, examining how the timing and modality of relatively rare or unexpected stimuli (surprise distractors) affects the detection and recognition of vibrotactile target patterns. At short distractor-target delays (< 350 ms), both auditory and vibrotactile surprise distractors impaired performance. At a longer delay (1050 ms), performance was not affected overall, even being improved with repeated exposure to the vibrotactile distractors. We discuss the importance of our findings in the context of HCI and cognitive psychology, and we provide design guidelines for mitigating the effects of distraction on haptic devices.