The research was designed to evaluate interpersonal coordination during conversation with a new measurement tool. The experiment uses an analysis based on recurrence strategies, known as cross recurrence quantification, to evaluate the shared activity between 2 postural time series in reconstructed phase space. Pairs of participants were found to share more locations in phase space (greater recurrence) in conditions where they were conversing with one another to solve a puzzle task than in conditions in which they convened with others. The trajectories of pairs of participants also showed less divergence when they conversed with each other than when they conversed with others well. This is offered as objective evidence of interpersonal coordination of postural sway in the context of a cooperative verbal task.

Perceiving the length of a rod by dynamic touch is tied to the inertia tensor I i j , a quantification of its resistance to rotational acceleration. Perception of the portion extending in front of the grasp has previously been ascribed to decomposing one component of I i j by attention. The tensorial nature of dynamic touch suggests that this ability must be anchored wholly in the tensor. Three experiments show that perceived partial length is a function of two components of the tensor, one tied primarily to magnitude and the other tied primarily to direction, whereas perceived whole length is a function of a magnitude component alone. Dynamic touch is characterized in terms of a haptic perceptual instrument that softly assembles to exploit I i j differently depending on the intention, producing 1:1 maps that are appropriately scaled for each intention.Selective attention is marked by the ability to respond to a subset ofphysically and physiologically available information that is appropriate for an intention to perceive a particular stimulus dimension. The degree of"success" at attention might be construed in terms of the degree to which putatively irrelevant dimensions of information influence or interfere with the perceiver's evaluation of the requested dimension. Relatedly, the degree of interference from dimensions that are unattended can be taken as indicators of processes that must be engaged in order to perceive the attended dimension. Although the bulk of data on attention comes from vision and audition, there are examples from touch as well. For example, it has been noted (e.g., Gibson, 1966) that a person using a tool to explore a surface receives information about both the handtool contact and the tool-surface contact but generally attends to the latter.The kind of selective attention that has been demonstrated in dynamic or effortful touch will provide our focus. Gibson (1966) drew a distinction between dynamic touch, which entails muscular exertion in moving or stabilizing an object, and haptic touch, which involves the articulation of joints and limb segments. For example, grasping a rod somewhere along its length to wield or simply hold it requires muscular torque to counter the rotational forces brought about by the mass distribution of the rod. A number ofexperiments have shown that whether

Various object properties are perceptible by wielding. We asked whether the dynamics of wielding differed as a function of the to-be-perceived property. Wielding motions were analyzed to determine if they differed under the intention to perceive or not perceive rod length (experiment 1), to perceive object height versus object width (experiment 2), and to perceive the length forward of where the rod was grasped versus the position of the grasp (experiment 3). Perceiving these different properties is known to depend on different components of the object's inertia tensor. Analyses of the subtle recurrent patterns in the phase space of the hand motions revealed differences in wielding across the different perceptual intentions. Haptic exploratory procedures may exhibit distinct exploratory dynamics.

The goal of this preliminary study was to examine data collected in the course of the development and conduct of the behind-the-knee (BTK) test for correlations between the objective scores of erythema and the sensory effects reported by the panelists. In addition, the intensity of physical characteristics of femcare products and prototypes was evaluated using the descriptive analysis panel (DAP) and results were compared to the BTK results to determine if certain physical characteristics of the products correlated to different sensations experienced by the BTK panelists. Test materials were commercially available or developmental catemenial products. In the BTK test, samples were applied daily to the area behind the knee and held in place for 6 hours per day for 5 consecutive days by an elastic knee band of the appropriate size. Irritation was graded 30-60 minutes after removal of each application. The DAP uses individuals trained to recognize and grade certain physical characteristics of products, including degree of plastic feel, scratchiness, glide, and cottony feel. In the BTK studies, the ability to differentiate between the test samples via reported sensory effects correlated with the ability to differentiate via objective scores for irritation in seven of 15 comparisons. A correlation between the magnitude of the irritation score, independent of the specific test sample, and reports of adverse sensory effects was observed in 13 of 15 comparisons. Two comparisons conducted in the BTK were also evaluated using the DAP. For one comparison, there was a clear difference in the product physical characteristics in the DAP that was consistent with mean erythema scores and reported sensory effects in the BTK. For the other comparison, there was no clear difference between the two products by either the DAP or the BTK.

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