Multimodal bivariate thematic maps: Auditory and haptic display

The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of multimodal bivariate thematic maps by utilizing auditory and haptic displays. With four different modes of display, the completion time of tasks and the recall (retention) rate were measured in two separate experiments. In terms of the completion time, haptic displays seem to interfere with other modalities. However, Color‐Auditory displays performed similarly to Color‐Color displays. For the recall rate, multimodal displays have higher recall rate, with users performing the best on Auditory‐Haptic displays. These findings confirmed the possibility of using auditory and haptic displays in visually dominant geographic information systems (GIS). We speculate that the natural quantitative hierarchies in auditory and haptic displays provide an advantage in the use of multimodal displays.