Congruent Kinesthetic and Tactile Haptic Rendering Accelerates the Learning of Highly Dynamic Virtual Sensorimotor Tasks

Advances in haptic technologies enable rich, multi-channel haptic rendering of interactions with virtual objects during virtual reality training. However, it remains an open question whether multi-channel haptic rendering (kinesthetic and tactile) provides superior motor learning and transfer when training dynamic tasks compared to simpler, single-channel sensory information. We investigated how 40 participants learned to invert and balance a virtual pendulum after training under four haptic rendering conditions: congruent kinesthetic and tactile rendering, kinesthetic rendering alone, tactile rendering alone, and no haptic rendering. Kinesthetic information was delivered through a delta robot, and tactile information through a two-dimensional skin-stretch device at the finger pads. Participant performance was measured in catch trials during training, in short- and long-term retention trials, and with a transfer task with a shorter pendulum. Participants from all four training conditions demonstrated the ability to improve and transfer their skills. However, we observed poorer performance during catch trials when training with reduced or absent haptic rendering compared to training with congruent kinesthetic and tactile rendering. The advantage of congruent haptic rendering over conditions lacking kinesthetic rendering was maintained during short-term retention, whereas no significant performance differences were observed between conditions in long-term retention and the transfer task. These results suggest that congruent haptic rendering benefits the task's early learning by supporting the generation of internal models of the task dynamics, with kinesthetic rendering playing a major role. Overall, our findings highlight the potential benefits of multi-channel haptic rendering to accelerate virtual reality training.