Modality Switching for Mitigation of Sensory Adaptation and Habituation in Personal Navigation Systems

When humans need to navigate across terrain accurately and quickly, they often use portable electronic navigation systems for directional guidance. Prior work in this field has focused on selecting either the visual or haptic sensory modality for providing such guidance and has indicated that either option may be preferable depending on the user's specific goals. However, basing the selection of visual or haptic guidance on static criteria of this type discounts important time-varying effects, primarily stimulus-specific adaptation (SSA) and habituation. Here, we propose a navigation system design that mitigates these detrimental effects by periodically switching between visual and haptic navigation guidance. While this is likely to incur an undesirable switching cost, we hypothesize that the long-term benefits of counteracting SSA and habituation will outweigh this cost. In this paper, we describe the design and results of a human-participant study intended to evaluate this hypothesis. Our findings indicate that modality switching results in a transient cost to performance, but also that switching modalities lessens the SSA and habituation effects over time as compared with single-modality systems. The results support the hypothesis that an alternating-modality system would outperform a single-modality system for long-duration navigation tasks.