Tactile Stimulation of the Human Head for Information Display

Abstract

A series of three studies was conducted to explore the use of tactile stimulation or light tapping of the human head to inform a pilot of possible threats or other situations in the flight environment. Study I confirmed that subjects could achieve 100% detection of the tactile stimuli. Localization performance, measured in Study 2, depended on the number of different stimulus sites and ranged from 93% accuracy for 6 sites to 47% accuracy for 12 sites across the parietal meridian of the head. In Study 3 we investigated the effect of performing the localization task simultaneously with a dual memory/tracking task or an air combat simulation task. These studies demonstrated that tactile information display could be an integral contributor to improved situation awareness, but not without cost to other task performance. The results of Study 3 were also examined with reference to popular models of attention and workload.