Minimum duration for presenting tactile stimuli to perceive stimulus locations on the palm

The duration for presenting tactile stimuli to generate certain images are important for developing tactile displays with effective information processing since such duration affects human short term memory, which determine accurate and effective perception for tactile information. In this study the experiment was conducted to obtain the duration required for generating spatial images from tactile stimuli. A total of five subjects participated in the experiment, where they performed two-point discrimination task with tactile stimuli ranging from 100ms to 300ms of stimulus duration. As a result, less than 200ms of duration lowered the performance of two-point differential threshold when two consecutive stimuli were given without inter-stimulus intervals. These results implied that less than 200ms of duration was not enough for identifying spatial information associated with tactile stimuli. The quantitative data obtained in this study give some insight for developing a mental model for identifying tactile spatial information.