Light touch contact between the body and an environmental referent reduces fluctuations of center of pressure (CoP) in quiet standing although the contact forces are insufficient to provide significant forces to stabilize standing balance. Maintenance of upright standing posture (with light touch contact) may include both predictive and reactive components. Recently Dickstein et al. (2003) demo...

People have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating their physical environments [1] with their fingers and hands. And more and more user interfaces taken advantage of that and allowing touch input to support these skills. Especially multi-touch interaction has received considerable attention in the last few years and the media interest in multi-touch interaction with large a...

Previous studies on tactile experiences have investigated a wide range of material surfaces across various skin sites of the human body in self-touch or other touch modes. Here, we investigate whether the sensory and emotional aspects of touch are related when evaluating wooden surfaces using fingertips in the absence of other sensory modalities. Twenty participants evaluated eight different pi...

The Midas touch refers to the altruistic effects of a brief touch. Though these effects have often been replicated, they remain poorly understood. We investigate the psychophysiology of the effect using remotely transmitted, precisely timed, tactile messages in an economic decision-making game called Ultimatum. Participants were more likely to accept offers after receiving a remotely transmitte...

The TOUCH-HapSys collaborative project investigates the psychophysical basis of human tactual perception in order to improve the efficiency and reliability of haptic displays. The present deliverable reports on the progress made in investigations on the basic tactual modes of active and passive touch. In psychophysical experiments MPI-T started to examine the principles of cue integration for a...

With the increased popularity of touchscreen mobile phones, touch gesture behavior is becoming more and more important. Increasing demand for safer access in touch screen mobile phones, ancient strategies like pins, tokens, or passwords fail to stay up with the challenges conferred. Most of the current touch gesture authentication schemes facing problem with accuracy based on score classifiers ...

User performance with a tabletop display was tested using touch-based and mouse-based interaction in a traditional pointing task. Dependent variables were throughput, error rate, and movement time. In a study with 12 participants, touch had a higher throughput with average of 5.53 bps compared to 3.83 bps for the mouse. Touch also had a lower movement time on average, with block means ranging f...

The developmental trajectories of specific forms of maternal touch during natural caregiving were examined across the first year in relation to the development of mother-infant reciprocal communication. One hundred and thirty-one mothers and infants in four groups aged 3, 6, 9, and 12 months were observed in a cross-sectional design at home during natural caregiving and mother-child play sessio...

Multi-touch interaction with computationally enhanced surfaces has received considerable recent attention. Approaches to the implementation of multi-touch interaction such as Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) and Diffused Illumination (DI) have allowed for the low cost development of such surfaces, leading to a number of technology and application innovations. Although many of these t...