Year: 2010
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Innovation and novelty in product design has become increasingly central to engaging consumers and enhancing product experience. This concept, which is based on a \nmulti‐disciplinary approach, is primarily concerned with how products engage our sensory organs and the resulting affective influence that these engagements have on \nthe consumer. In touch research, there is limited research into how tactile textures used in product design are perceived when the fingers are run across them. \nSpecifically, how vibrations generated by finger scanning in active touch could be related to affective texture discrimination is not known. \n \nThe aim of this research was to ascertain the contribution of vibration to the communication of affective qualities of tactile textures. Specifically, the objectives \nwere to investigate the affective language used in discussing tactile textures, and to determine the salience of vibratory cues in affective texture discrimination. Four \nexperiments were conducted to address these objectives. Experiment 1 was designed to understand the affective language used to describe tactile textures, and whether the \nvibratory and topographical characteristics of tactile stimuli are indicators for affective ratings. Experiments 2 and 3 discussed how imposed vibration can communicate \ntextural adjectives and that there are perceptual differences between imposed and texture‐elicited vibrations. The final experiment, investigated how imposed vibration onto tactile textures can alter affective rating by manipulating the texture’s vibratory spectral content. \n \nThe results of this work show that tactile textures can be rated using affective language, and that vibration contributes to these ratings as well as to textural \ndescriptors. The results also show that texture‐elicited and imposed vibrations are not perceptually similar. A new insight into the role of vibratory parameters in affective \ntexture assessment is offered using imposed vibrations to tactile textures. Recommendations for future research are also given.
Author: Louise R. Manfredi
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1539204644