Masking effects for damping JND

Two psychophysical experiments are conducted to identify masking effects for the perception of damping. The results indicate that the just noticeable difference for damping increases with the magnitude of additional masking stimuli. This is the case for environments consisting of a damping/stiffness and environments consisting of a damping/inertia. This has implications for the design and evaluation of haptic human-system interfaces, telepresence systems and haptic rendering algorithms.