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Developing a Tactile Habituation Task for DeafBlind Children Using Wearable Haptics
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Deanna Gagne1, Nicolas Prudencio Rojas2, Hayley Broadway1, Jen Tennison2, Marie Coppola3, Jenna Gorlewicz2; 1Gallaudet University, 2St. Louis University, 3University of Connecticut
Congenitally DeafBlind children face profound barriers in early access to language and social interaction, often resulting in cascading negative effects on cognitive development (McInnes &Treffry, 2018). Because traditional methods for assessing perception and cognition typically rely on visual or auditory input, both for stimulus delivery and behavioral response (Noles, Danovitch, & Cashon, 2024), they remain largely inaccessible to this population during sensitive developmental windows. This project explores a fully tactile approach to investigating early perceptual and cognitive processes by pairing controlled haptic input with physiological measures. Our long-term goal is to develop a nonlinguistic habituation paradigm, delivered entirely through touch, that uses heart rate (HR) as the dependent measure to assess quantity perception and discrimination in DeafBlind children. Because gaze and reaching behaviors are not reliably accessible in this population, we instead rely on continuous HR data to track responses to tactile stimuli. As an initial step, we designed a wearable haptic device that delivers temporally structured vibration sequences and records HR through an integrated optical sensor. Critical to our process was the feedback from multiple DeafBlind protactile-using team members. We collaboratively worked to ensure the device’s interface and functions could be fully operated by touch, incorporating their feedback to maximize usability and accessibility. To evaluate the feasibility of our paradigm, we conducted internal validity testing with eight hearing, sighted adults (5 male; 19-31y, M=25.3y) from our local network. We aimed to elicit periods of measurable focused attention in participants, indexed by changes in their HR. Participants received a pattern of vibrations through a wrist-based haptic wearable and were asked to identify the pattern. In total, five haptic profiles were presented to each individual in random order. In one version, participants (n=5) chose the pattern from a set of six tiles with patterns of dots and dashes (representing short/long vibrations, respectively). The three remaining participants reported the pattern using written dots and dashes. Accuracy was 100 percent; participants were attending to the task. HR data was continuously collected. Results show HR modulation at the onset of haptic sequences, indicating the paradigm elicits measurable autonomic responses. However, the direction (increasing vs. decreasing), magnitude (absolute values ranging from 2 to 20 bpm from baseline), and latency of HR response varied across individuals. This raises important questions about how to characterize responses for a task that depends on stimulus-specific processing and habituation as a trigger for subsequent trials. Our testing results support the potential of combining wearable haptics with physiological measures to investigate early cognitive processing through touch alone. By eliminating auditory, visual, and linguistic demands, this paradigm may enable the investigation of cognitive capacities, such as quantity perception in DeafBlind children, that are typically inaccessible through conventional methods. This abstract is submitted to the Sandbox series to gather feedback on stimulus design, interpretation of HR as a dependent measure in habituation paradigms, and strategies for adapting this method for use with young DeafBlind children, including baseline-setting and trial triggering in a habituation framework.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition, Methods