Achievement

IGERT trainees Cholewiak, Kibbe, and Denisova, and affiliate Kim continued work on a collaboration initiated in the Integrative Methods in Perceptual Science course on perception of virtual haptic surfaces. Haptic surfaces were generated using a Personal Haptic Interface Mechanism (PHANToM) force-feedback device, which is widely used in industrial applications and provides proprioceptive feedback with no skin contact. The group found that adaptation to curved surfaces produced strong haptic aftereffects; adding visual information that contradicted the haptic cues did not alter the adaption. The results show a strong within-modality constraint on adaptation. The IGERT students worked independently as a team on design, programming, data collection and analyses and will present the results at the May 2011 meeting of the Visual Sciences Society.