The haptic crayola effect: Exploring the role of naming in learning haptic stimuli

A haptic icon is a short physical stimulus attached to a simple meaning, which provides information and feedback to a user. To scale the utility demonstrated for small icon sets to larger ones, we need efficient strategies to help users learn subtle distinctions among stimuli, in a modality for which they may not hold detailed descriptive percepts. This paper investigates the effect of naming haptic stimuli - i.e. explicitly creating a linguistic marker - on the accuracy with which users are able to identify, distinguish, and recall stimuli. We conducted a between-subjects experiment using 60 participants equally divided among three naming conditions: no names, pre-selected non-descriptive names, and self-selected names. The experiment examined the impact of naming strategy on the ability of participants to identify stimuli in a nonverbal matching test, and on remembering stimulus names. For this challenging task and the degree of learning afforded, naming did not significantly impact accuracy of matching stimuli to meanings for all participants. However, more than twice of many of those allowed to choose names reported the ability to remember and distinguish stimuli than those required to use non-descriptive names, and many participants felt that the names were useful. Of middle-performing participants, the self-selected names group performed significantly better than the non-descriptive names group, and appeared to progress more quickly in learning. We summarize evidence for a trend that might widen with refined naming strategies and more extensive learning.