It can be useful to display information about numerosity haptically. For instance, to display the time of day or distances when visual or auditory feedback is not possible or desirable. Here, we investigated the possibility of displaying numerosity information by means of a sequence of vibration pulses. From previous studies on numerosity perception in vision, haptics and audition it is known that numerosity judgment can be facilitated by grouping. Therefore, we investigated whether perception of the number of vibration pulses in a sequence can be facilitated by temporally grouping the pulses. We found that indeed temporal grouping can lead to considerably smaller errors and lower error rates indicating that this facilitated the task, but only when participants knew in advance whether the pulses would be temporally grouped. When grouped and ungrouped series of pulses were presented randomly interleaved, there was no difference in performance. This means that temporally grouping vibration sequences can allow the sequence to be displayed at a faster rate while it remains possible to perceive the number of vibration pulses accurately if the users is aware of the temporal grouping.

中文翻译：

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通过振动模式表示数量

以触​​觉方式显示有关数量的信息可能很有用。例如，当视觉或听觉反馈不可能或不可取时显示一天中的时间或距离。在这里，我们研究了通过一系列振动脉冲来显示数量信息的可能性。从先前对视觉、触觉和听觉的数量感知的研究可知，通过分组可以促进数量判断。因此，我们研究了是否可以通过对脉冲进行时间分组来促进对序列中振动脉冲数量的感知。我们发现，时间分组确实可以导致相当小的错误和更低的错误率，这表明这有助于完成任务，但前提是参与者事先知道脉冲是否会按时间分组。当分组和未分组的脉冲系列随机交错呈现时，性能没有差异。这意味着时间分组振动序列可以允许序列以更快的速度显示，同时如果用户知道时间分组，则仍然可以准确地感知振动脉冲的数量。