Sophisticated graphic displays are increasingly used in both industry and the professions for presenting complex information in a variety of visuospatial formats. Unfortunately, the potential advantages of such displays are often outweighed by the perceptual and cognitive challenges associated with processing very rich and complex visualizations. One possibility for ameliorating these challenges is to provide users with supplementary guidance that helps them cope with a display’s visual demands. The provision of tactile cues for guiding the user to high relevance aspects of a display offers a promising approach for improving visual information search. However, for tactile support to be effective, it needs to take account of the similarities and differences between visual and tactile processing of graphic information. In this presentation we report a study that compared participants’ strategies in these two modalities. In a counterbalanced design, participants explored both visual and tactile versions of multi-element graphics in order to identify relationships amongst display items. Hand movements were videoed through a glass-topped table during haptic exploration of a transparent tactile display, and visual search patterns for an analogous visual display presented on a computer screen were recorded via an eye tracker. Compared with the visual versions, processing of the tactile displays was slower, more deliberate, and more error-prone. While a highly automated quasi-parallel approach was observed for the visual task, tactile search was characterized by serial, cumulative approaches overall but with diverse strategies across participants. Implications for the potential of tactile guidance to support complex visual processing are discussed.
Authors: Richard Lowe and Madeleine Keehner
Event: SF08: Embodied Interaction in Mobile, Physical and Virtual Environments Workshop