Perceptions of Temporal Synchrony in Multimodal Displays

Abstract

Current multimodal interfaces make use of several intra-modal perceptual judgements that help users “directly perceive” information. These judgements help users organize and group information with little cognitive effort. Cross-modal perceptual relationships are much less commonly used in multimodal interfaces, but could also provide processing advantages for grouping and understanding data across different modalities. In this paper we examine whether individuals are able to directly perceive cross-modal auditory and tactile temporal rate synchrony events. If direct perception is possible, then we would expect that individuals would be able to correctly make these judgements with very little cognitive effort. Our results indicate that individuals have difficulty identifying when the temporal rates of auditory and tactile stimuli in a monitoring task are synchronous. Changes in workload, manipulated using a secondary visual task, resulted in changes in performance in the temporal synchrony task. We concluded that temporal rate synchrony is not a perceptual relationship that allows for direct perception, but further investigation of cross-modal perceptual relationships is required.