Assessing the representational structure of softness activated by words

Abstract

Softness is an important material property that can be judged directly, by interacting with an object, but also indirectly, by simply looking at an image of a material. The latter is likely possible by filling in relevant multisensory information from prior experiences with soft materials. Such experiences are thought to lead to associations that make up our representations about perceptual softness. Here, we investigate the structure of this representational space when activated by words, and compare it to haptic and visual perceptual spaces that we obtained in earlier work. To this end, we performed an online study where people rated different sensory aspects of soft materials, presented as written names. We compared the results with the previous studies where identical ratings were made on the basis of visual and haptic information. Correlation and Procrustes analyses show that, overall, the representational spaces of verbally presented materials were similar to those obtained from haptic and visual experiments. However, a classifier analysis showed that verbal representations could better be predicted from those obtained from visual than from haptic experiments. In a second study we rule out that these larger discrepancies in representations between verbal and haptic conditions could be due to difficulties in material identification in haptic experiments. We discuss the results with respect to the recent idea that at perceived softness is a multidimensional construct.

Perceptuo-affective organization of touched materials in younger and older adults

“…Note that aging of emotional responses to pictures also possibly partly reflects biological factors [ 47 ]. A preservation could, e.g., be supported by substitution on properties from memory [ 51 ]. However, this remains highly speculative and requires future research, also with respect to the actual detail perception of more or less pleasant rough, granular and fibrous stimuli.…”

“…Such, preservation could, e.g. be supported by substitution on properties from memory [ 51 ]. To find out, we developed a shorter variant of the task used in our previous study [ 1 ], and tested it with younger (18–29 years) and older adults (61–77 years).…”

Probing the Link Between Vision and Language in Material Perception Using Psychophysics and Unsupervised Learning

“…With a large-scale image dataset of materials, Schmidt et al (2023) 41 used visual triplet similarity judgments from crowd-sourcing to distill a representational space, which was later annotated by humans to find conceptual and perceptual dimensions of materials. Cavdan et al (2023) 42 studied the structure of the representational space of perceptual softness triggered by material name with a cross-group analysis and suggested that verbally activated softness representation correlates with that derived from vision 30 . However, participants in these studies were often limited to judging materials based on predetermined categories and attributes without being given the opportunity to express their personal semantic interpretations.…”