Discrimination of Changes of Latency during Voluntary Hand Movement of Virtual Objects

Eight subjects’ abilities to detect changes in system latency during voluntary lateral hand movement of virtual objects were studied in an immersing virtual environment. A two-alternative forced choice procedure was used in which discrimination of latency was studied with respect to three reference latencies: 27, 94, and 194 msec. Results show that subjects are able to reliably detect changes definitely less than 33 msec and probably less than 16.7 msec. Strikingly, for the short latencies we examined, subjects’ ability to detect latency changes does not depend upon the base latency we used as a reference. Thus, the discrimination we studied does not appear to follow Weber’s law and may provide evidence for quick adaptation to the reference latencies used.