News in brief

Abstract

development of visual prosthetic devices. Dr. Goodrich disagreed with the statement, "comparisons of various methods of interfacing visual information has revealed most accurate and rapid recognition has been achieved through the skin." I suspect that there was a misunderstanding about what this statement means, apparently even when he read it in the context of the article. By recognition of visual information was meant literally the person's recognition of the spatial elements of an image within a given field of view. Such recognition is often measured by 2 point acuity and vernier acuity in the simple case. In larger fields with sophisticated systems, more complex images are used to measure resolution, such as Snellen letters and bigrams. Such was the nature of the given research and the focus of the article. This is in contrast to what Dr. Goodrich's letter indicates by statements that imply similar information is transferred by synthetic speech, etc. Spatial-visual information is different from the information relayed by synthetic speech, etc. Said another way, the experience of recognizing visual information is different than the experience of recognizing information usually relayed by vision. There was comment that my conclusions about the tactual system in general were not supported by appropriate references, and it was suggested that I ignored literature on "synthetic speech," etc. Most of the literature on "synthetic speech," etc., was not crddressed because it was not