Tactile Change Blindness in an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control Task

Abstract

One promising means of overcoming data overload in complex domains is through the introduction of tactile displays, which can offload the overburdened visual channel. However, the effectiveness of tactile displays depends on taking into consideration attentional systems and the limitations of the human perception. One important question is the extent to which the tactile modality is susceptible to change blindness, i.e. the failure to detect even large and expected changes when these changes coincide with a “transient” stimulus. Recent research has demonstrated an analog of change blindness in the tactile modality for pattern change recognition. The present study examined whether tactile change blindness, as well as crossmodal visual-tactile change blindness, occurs in the context of search and monitoring tasks, and whether it is affected by the addition of a secondary task. The application domain for this experiment was simulated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle control. The findings confirmed the occurrence of tactile change blindness; however, no crossmodal change blindness was observed and change detection was unaffected by the addition of a secondary search task. Overall, this research add to the knowledge base in multimodal and redundant information processing and can inform the design of multimodal displays for complex, data-rich domains.