A Vibrotactile Reaction Time Task to Measure Cognitive Performance in Virtual and Real Environments

Abstract

Cognitive load is an important concept to understand people's cognitive processing performance of information. To assess cognitive load, several methods can be applied. For performance-based measure, Reaction times (RT) tasks can be used. Compared to physiological measures such as electroencephalography, RT tasks can be easily implemented and can be used as an alternative to subjective questionnaires, like NASA-TLX. In this paper we present two evaluation studies of a vibrotactile wearable for RT tasks. The first study evaluates its potential for Choice Reaction Time (CRT) tasks to compare real and virtual settings, the second study uses a simple Reaction Time (RT) task to evaluate cognitive effort on two different VR locomotion techniques while working on tasks in VR. The system is based on a vibrotactile wearable for the cues/stimuli and is suited for VR settings as well as real environments. We argue that such systems allow to compare cognitive performance between real and virtual tasks and discuss the limitation of the system.