The psychophysics of temperature perception and thermal-interface design

This research is focused on the development and evaluation of a thermal display that could be incorporated into a haptic device. A review of the research on human temperature perception has assisted in specifying the characteristics required for such a display, and has revealed areas in which there is insufficient knowledge to make these specifications. For example, the number of cooling and/or warming elements that could be processed independently is unknown, as is the extent to which spatial summation would influence the perception of these independent inputs. A thermal display is being developed with the objective of determining how thermal cues should best be presented to subjects. A preliminary study on the perception of thermal cues from materials of varying thermal conductivity was conducted and revealed that when only thermal information is available for materials with high thermal conductivity differences in the order of 200-300 W m^-1 k^-1 are required in order to perceive that two samples with similar surface structure differ