Prior research has shown that the direction of a user’s focus affects the perception of tactile cues. Additionally, user agency over touch stimulation has been shown to affect tactile perception. With the development of more complicated haptic and multi-sensory devices, simple tactile cues are rarely used in isolation and the effect of focus direction and of user agency on the perception of a sequence of tactile cues is unknown. In this study, we investigate the effect of both of these variables, focus direction and agency, on the perception of a cue sequence.

Vibrotactile sleeves and multimodal armbands show promise as devices that can transmit information to a user through the tactile sense. In this way, individuals have the potential to receive information haptically when typical auditory or visual channels are preoccupied or unavailable. To achieve this, individuals must successfully learn the mapping between haptic cues and informational icons through cross-modal associative learning. The success of this process is limited by perceptual capabilities of users, as well as lack of neural markers to quantify the success of haptic learning.