Tactile stimulation devices are gaining popularity in haptic science and technology—they are lightweight, low-cost, can be wearable, and do not suffer from instability during closed loop interactions with users. Applying tactile stimulation, by means of stretching the fingerpad skin concurrently with kinesthetic force feedback, has been shown to augment the perceived stiffness during interactions with elastic objects. However, to date, the perceptual augmentation due to artificial skin-stretch was studied in the absence of visual feedback. In this article, we tested whether this perceptual augmentation is robust when the stretch is applied in combination with visual displacement feedback. We used a forced-choice stiffness discrimination task with four conditions: force feedback, force feedback with skin-stretch, force and visual feedback, and force and visual feedback with skin-stretch. We found that the visual feedback weakens, but does not eliminate, the skin-stretch induced perceptual effect. Additionally, no effect of visual feedback on the discrimination precision was found.

中文翻译：

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视觉反馈减弱了人工皮肤拉伸对感知刚度的增强

触觉刺激设备在触觉科学和技术中越来越受欢迎——它们重量轻、成本低、可穿戴，并且在与用户的闭环交互过程中不会受到不稳定的影响。通过在动觉力反馈的同时拉伸指垫皮肤，施加触觉刺激已被证明可以在与弹性物体的交互过程中增加感知刚度。然而，迄今为止，在没有视觉反馈的情况下研究了由于人工皮肤拉伸引起的感知增强。在本文中，我们测试了当拉伸与视觉位移反馈结合使用时，这种感知增强是否稳健。我们使用了具有四个条件的强制选择刚度判别任务：力反馈、带有皮肤拉伸的力反馈、力和视觉反馈、以及皮肤拉伸的力和视觉反馈。我们发现视觉反馈减弱了，但并没有消除皮肤拉伸引起的感知效果。此外，没有发现视觉反馈对辨别精度的影响。