Sample Methods Section

Methods

Participants

Participants were recruited through notices placed onbulletin boards and circulated through the campus BBSand student mailing lists. The recruitment notice invitedparticipation in a study that used “desktop roboticstechnology to ‘touch’ the fingertips of another person overthe net and exchange information with that person.”Compensation for participation was offered in the form of

a US$10.00 gift certificate to the campus bookstore.Prospective volunteers for the study were asked to readthe consent form, posted online, prior to signing up for thestudy, and to contact the senior investigator if they wishedto participate. For participants to be eligible they had tobe right-handed, over 18, and unacquainted with any otherperson planning to volunteer for the study. Uponacceptance into the participant pool, volunteers wererandomly assigned to the “CyberGrasp” condition or the“PHANToM” condition and directed to one of two lablocations on campus.

Sample Methods Section

Procedures

Upon arrival at their respective lab locations,participants were provided with a copy of the consentform and their signatures secured and countersigned bythe experimenters. Participants were offered theopportunity to wear goggles and, in the case of theCyberGrasp, glove liners, during the experiment.They were then provided with a PowerPoint tutorial tailored to the type of haptic device to which they were

assigned. The tutorial introduced them to haptics and inthe case of the PHANToM user provided an opportunityfor them to practice using the device for active explorationof a digital object. The CyberGrasp user’s role in theexperiment was to be a passive recipient of touch and assuch did not “practice” but was simply taken through thecalibration process upon completion of the tutorial.The experimenters in their respective lab locationscommunicated with Motorola Talkabout radios tocoordinate opening of the collaborative workspace. Participants joined in the workspace over an ordinaryInternet connection. Next, they were provided with oralinstructions which reinforced the explanations of theexperimental task provided in the tutorials. Below are theinstructions provided the PHANToM user; similarinstructions were provided to the CyberGrasp user:

(Note: Your instructions don’t need to be this long. Just make sure you have included either a verbatim copy of the instructions or a summary which highlights the important points)

In this study you are going to be interacting with apartner who is located at a computer in another part ofthe building. He or she will be wearing the CyberGrasp,which is a device you saw pictured in the tutorial thatlooks like a glove with tendons. The hand is the graphicalrepresentation of your partner’s hand; it tracks theposition and movement of his/her fingers precisely. Thewhite ball is a cursor representing the movement of thestylus of the PHANToM device that you are using. Ittracks the movement of your fingertip precisely. When youtouch one of the five fingertips you see on the screen, yourpartner will feel your touch on the corresponding finger.What we have done is to make a kind of Morse code inwhich the letters of the alphabet are mapped onto yourpartner’s fingers. For example, when your press yourpartner’s thumb once, you are transmitting the letter ‘A.’When you press your partner’s index finger four times, itmeans you are transmitting the letter ‘Q’. The other 24letters will be transmitted in the same way. You won’thave to remember this code, as we will provide it for youon the keypad and also on a piece of paper. Just in caseyou are unsure, here are the thumb, index, middle, ring,and pinky fingers.The PHANToM device only has a single point ofcontact, so you may have some difficulty at first makingcontact with the partner’s finger during the task. Be sureto press firmly; you will “feel” the “collision” when youmake contact. You should press on the top third of the finger, just above the joint, not the palm, or other parts.Otherwise, he or she cannot feel your touch and theinformation you transmit might be misleading.

You are going to send your partner some three-letterwords. These words may or may not spell something yourecognize as a word. You will be given a list of 8 words,each with three letters, and a final word with two letters.Next to each letter in the word is the code, that is, whichof your partner’s fingers you should touch and how manytimes you should touch it.When you and your partner are ready to begin, I willstart by pressing F1, which sends your partner a messagethat a new experiment begins. Then I will press F2 tosend the message that the first word transmission begins.You’ll start with the first word on your list. Then I’ll pressF3 to send the message to your partner that you are goingto send the first letter. You’ll receive a response that says“ready for the next letter.” You’ll be sending the letters inthe order that they appear in the word. You should touchyour partner on the appropriate finger, the appropriatenumber of times, to send the letter. Consult the list to seewhich finger to press and how many times to press it for

each letter.

When you have finished transmitting the letter, I willpress F4 to send the message “letter transmission ends.”Then you should receive a message indicating that yourpartner is ready for the next letter. This process isrepeated two more times until you have sent your partnera three-letter word. You should then receive a messagesaying that she or he is ready for the next word.After you have sent the last letter in the word, I willpress F5 to transmit the message “End word.” Yourpartner will then need a few seconds to move the lettersfrom the message window where they have been enteredinto the Words log. When that has been done you will getthe message “ready for new word.” You will repeat thisprocess 8 more times, starting with the second word onyour list. When you have sent all the words, I will pressF12 to send your partner a message that says“experiment ends.” Are you ready to begin?

As an added check to ensure that any obtained errors inlocation or frequency of touch were attributable only tothe haptic interaction and not to participants’ misreadingof the code, participants were required to state aloudwhich finger they intended to touch and how many timesthey intended to touch it. When the oral instructions werecompleted, the investigator supervising the PHANToMuser started a process for recording the haptic data stream(capturing and time-stamping applied force at 10msintervals) and signaled through the keypad that the experiment was to begin. The investigator supervising the

CyberGrasp user minimized the collaborative workspacewindow so that the participant would respond only to thehaptically communicated information. The pair ofparticipants worked their way through a word list thatcontained all 26 letters of the alphabet, sorted randomlyinto nine sets of three- and two-letter words.

Administration of post-task measures

At the conclusion of the trials, participants completed apost-task evaluation with items adapted from theBasdogan et al. measure of co-presence. Among thequestions of interest: Did the subject feel present in thehaptic environment? Did the subject feel co-present withthe remote partner? Did the subject believe that theremote partner was a real person? Subjects were alsoasked to make attributions about their partners withrespect to standard dimensions of perception (unsocial-social;sensitive-insensitive; impersonal-personal; cold-warm)(Sallnas, Rassmus-Grohn, & Sjostrom, 2001). Copies of the instruments are provided in Appendix A