ABSTRACT: I would like to provide an engineer’s perspective on how psychophysical studies have contributed to haptics research. In my laboratory, we have been engaged in three types of haptic psychophysical studies: threshold, cognition, and motor performance. Threshold studies reveal peripheral limitations in human sensory resolution due to noisy sensors such as the mechanoreceptors. Examples include discrimination thresholds for force magnitude and direction. Cognitive studies address central limitations in human perception as constrained by attention and memory resources. Our inability to detect changes in tactile stimulation patterns is one example. Whereas threshold and cognitive studies are mainly concerned with perception, human motor performance is an integral part of haptics. Our recent formulation of a force-constancy hypothesis serves to explain a perceptual illusion in a haptic virtual environment. In this talk, I will summarize our recent efforts in using these three types of psychophysical studies to improve and validate haptic interfaces. I will highlight the interplay between psychophysical studies and hardware/software designs to illustrate how psychophysical studies can be inspired by and then inform design specifications. Finally, I will discuss the challenges associated with applying psychophysical techniques to the assessment of human performance in complex haptic environments.

Biography of Pr. Hong Z. Tan: Hong Z. Tan received her Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P.R. China. She earned her Master and Doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory before joining the faculty at Purdue's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1998. Since 2002, she has held a courtesy appointment at Purdue’s School of Mechanical Engineering for her contribution to the Perception-Based Engineering program. She has also held a McDonnell Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University, and a Visiting Associate Professorship in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. She was a recipient of the US National Science Foundation's Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Award from 2000 to 2004. In addition to serving on numerous conference program committees, she was a co-organizer (with Blake Hannaford) of the International Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems from 2003 to 2005.