A Preliminary Study on the Perceptual Independence Between Vibrotactile and Thermal Senses

Abstract

We study whether the vibrotactile and thermal senses are independent in terms of information transmission. In Exp. 1, we estimated the respective information transmission capacities of vibrotactile and thermal stimuli. In Exp. 2, we measured the information transfer (IT) of vibrotactile-thermal multimodal stimuli. We compare the IT values obtained in the two experiments and demonstrate that approximately 90% of the information encoded through the two sensory modalities is preserved when they are combined. This result can contribute to the design of multimodal haptic stimuli for various user-interactive purposes.