The role of vibratory cues in affective responses to tactile textures

Innovation and novelty in product design has become increasingly central to engaging consumers and enhancing product experience. This concept, which is based on a multi‐disciplinary approach, is primarily concerned with how products engage our sensory organs and the resulting affective influence that these engagements have on the 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. Specifically, how vibrations generated by finger scanning in active touch could be related to affective texture discrimination is not known. The aim of this research was to ascertain the contribution of vibration to the communication of affective qualities of tactile textures. Specifically, the objectives were to investigate the affective language used in discussing tactile textures, and to determine the salience of vibratory cues in affective texture discrimination. Four experiments were conducted to address these objectives. Experiment 1 was designed to understand the affective language used to describe tactile textures, and whether the vibratory and topographical characteristics of tactile stimuli are indicators for affective ratings. Experiments 2 and 3 discussed how imposed vibration can communicate textural 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. The 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 descriptors. 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 texture assessment is offered using imposed vibrations to tactile textures. Recommendations for future research are also given.