The Role of Audiovisual Feedback Delays and Bimodal Congruency for Visuomotor Performance in Human-Machine Interaction

Despite incredible technological progress in the last decades, latency is still an issue for today's technologies and their applications. To better understand how latency and resulting feedback delays affect the interaction between humans and cyber-physical systems (CPS), the present study examines separate and joint effects of visual and auditory feedback delays on performance and the motor control strategy in a complex visuomotor task. Thirty-six participants played the Wire Loop Game, a fine motor skill task, while going through four different delay conditions: no delay, visual only, auditory only, and audiovisual (length: 200 ms). Participants’ speed and accuracy for completing the task and movement kinematic were assessed. Visual feedback delays slowed down movement execution and impaired precision compared to a condition without feedback delays. In contrast, delayed auditory feedback improved precision. Descriptively, the latter finding mainly appeared when congruent visual and auditory feedback delays were provided. We discuss the role of temporal congruency of audiovisual information as well as potential compensatory mechanisms that can inform the design of multisensory feedback in human-CPS interaction faced with latency.