Biology subjects

Cavdan, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Cavdan, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Roughness or sliminess: What makes a haptic material unpleasant

The current study aims to identify materials that most people experience as being unpleasant to touch and to uncover the perceptual attributes that link to unpleasantness. We sampled 79 everyday materials covering a wide range of sensory properties such as fluidity, granularity, roughness, and softness, e.g., cooking oil, sand, coconut, and silk. We asked participants to freely explore these materials with their dominant hand and subsequently rate their unpleasantness and 23 sensory attributes (e.g., elasticity, stickiness) in the absence of visual and auditory feedback. We collected data on material unpleasantness from two populations: Germany and the UK. Our wide array of materials showed different unpleasantness levels that correlated with specific perceptual material attributes. In general, viscous and deformable materials (e.g., hair gel, play-doh) felt more unpleasant to touch than surface-soft and smooth materials. Results were comparable for the German and UK samples. Overall, our results revealed a relationship between specific sensory attributes of materials and their unpleasantness, which seems to be consistent across German and UK samples. Our findings contribute to the understanding of how various sensory attributes are related to haptic unpleasantness. These insights advance our understanding of haptic perception with various implications, such as product design and affective computing systems, as both seek to integrate touch for detecting and modulating human affective states.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Happiness promotes global processing in haptic perception

Happy and sad mood promote global and local visual processing, respectively. However, it is unclear whether mood also affects the processing level in haptic perception. Here, we used classical music to induce happy and sad mood in blindfolded participants before they scanned 3D-printed configurations with their fingers. Additionally, we included a neutral group who did not listen to any music. Global shapes were triangles, circles, or squares (33mm) composed of smaller local relief shapes (3 mm): either triangles, circles, or squares. Participants explored a probe stimulus with identical local and global shapes, and two comparison stimuli, matching the probe in local, or global shape. They reported which comparison stimulus appeared more similar to the probe. In the sad group, participants chose the locally matching comparison more frequently than in the happy and neutral groups, revealing that sad mood promotes local processing also in touch. Overall, participants chose the globally matching comparison more often, suggesting that global processing is more prominent in touch than previously assumed.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Materials in action: The look and feel of soft

The softness of objects can be perceived through several senses. For instance, to judge the softness of our cats fur, we do not only look at it, we also run our fingers in idiosyncratic ways through its coat. Recently, we have shown that haptically perceived softness covaries with the compliance, viscosity, granularity, and furriness of materials (Dovencioglu et al.,2020). However, it is unknown whether vision can provide similar information about the various aspects of perceived softness. Here, we investigated this question in an experiment with three conditions: in the haptic condition, blindfolded participants explored materials with their hands, in the visual-static condition participants were presented with close-up photographs of the same materials, and in the visual-dynamic condition participants watched videos of the hand-material interactions that were recorded in the haptic condition. After haptically or visually exploring the materials participants rated them on various attributes. Our results show a high overall perceptual correspondence between the three experimental conditions. With a few exceptions, this correspondence tended to be strongest between haptic and visual-dynamic conditions. These results are discussed with respect to information potentially available through the senses, or through prior experience, when judging the softness of materials.

neuroscience↗