The equivalence of vision and haptics when matched spatiotemporally

Two experiments are described in which the task was to identify a set of stimuli that were presented both haptically and visually such that the spatiotemporal display of information was matched. The stimuli were pre-recorded movement pathways followed during the exploration of capital letters. In the haptic tasks explorers were guided along the pathways by two mechanical devices - the tactile display system (Experiment 1) and the Phantom (Experiment 2). In the visual tasks the same pathways were plotted on a monitor. Both the visual and haptic tasks were undertaken in moving window and stationary window modes. In the former conditions the participant´s hand was moved along the pathway (haptic condition)_ or the participant watched a 1 cm segment of line progressively trace out the pathway. In the stationary window tasks a tactile stimulus was moved underneath a stationary fingertip or the stimulus was moved behind a 1 cm motionless window. In terms of latency to stimulus identification, the moving window conditions yielded better performance than the stationary window conditions. However, performance in the haptic and visual conditions did not differ significantly, indicating a modal equivalence when information is presented to both senses in a matched manner.