Preparing a Psychological Experiment on a Tactile Display

Seamless IT interfaces can provide sophisticated environments for experiments. We describe a setting from motivational psychology, targeting to identify the attitudes and strategies of Poker players by observing their individual cards and activities in a non-invasive way. A digitally supported game on a tactile table can help to simulate a typical casino atmosphere even in a lab environment, while necessary data can be directly gathered and stored for later processing. Starting from the requirements defined from psychologists, we describe selected design issues when deploying the Poker game to the tactile display. The paper concludes with findings collected in experiments and recommendations for further work.