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The Perception of the Centre of Elastic Force Fields: A Model of Integration of the Force and Position Signals

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Multisensory Softness

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems ((SSTHS))

Abstract

Softness perception offers a good opportunity to study how position and force information are integrated during exploratory movements. This chapter presents a model of how this integration might happen when identifying the central position of a very weak elastic force field rendered with a haptic device. In this task, the force near the central position of the force field is below the perceptual threshold. The participant needs to explore the force field actively to identify its central position. The model predicts both the systematic and variable errors observed in this task. It also yields an estimate of the lowest force that can be sensed and suggests that the underlying processes are affected by at least two noise sources that reflect limits in our force and position sensing abilities. An implication of the existence of a force threshold for softness perception is that the perceived stiffness of very soft material might be overestimated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An alternative view is to conceptualize the processes yielding a sensation as intrinsically noisy (Thurstone 1927). In this case, the sensation elicited by the stimulus is modeled as a random variable while the threshold is assumed to be fixed. Moreover, the response variability arises from the fluctuations of the sensation instead of the threshold. The two threshold models are not distinguishable empirically without making additional assumptions. Depending on the view, the response variability can therefore be interpreted either as quantifying the variability of the threshold or the amount of noise in the sensory channel (Gescheider 1997; Macmillan and Creelman 2005).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Francesca Bocca who collected the data in the original study, as well as Netta Gurari, one anonymous reviewer and the editor, Massimiliano Di Luca, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (RBCS), Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Morego 30, 16123, Genoa, Italy

    Gabriel Baud-Bovy

  2. Faculty of Psychology, San Raffaele Vita-Salute University, Milan, Italy

    Gabriel Baud-Bovy

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  1. Gabriel Baud-Bovy
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Correspondence to Gabriel Baud-Bovy .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Massimiliano Di Luca

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Baud-Bovy, G. (2014). The Perception of the Centre of Elastic Force Fields: A Model of Integration of the Force and Position Signals. In: Di Luca, M. (eds) Multisensory Softness. Springer Series on Touch and Haptic Systems. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6533-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6533-0_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-6532-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-6533-0

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