Biology subjects

Drewing, K.

Publications and source records attributed to Drewing, K..

6 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↗

bioRxiv2024

Exploring For Gloss: The Role of Active Exploration in Visual Material Perception

Image motion contributes to the perception of visual material properties, and motion signals are generated during active exploration. However, little is known about how specific perceptual tasks influence the actions that generate these cues. In an experiment using virtual reality and real-time hand tracking, we investigated how the demands of perceptual tasks (e.g., judging gloss or lightness) shape exploratory behaviours. Participants either observed or actively explored objects varying in gloss and lightness while performing a matching task. We analysed how their exploration patterns varied based on the tasks. Using the same stimuli in both tasks, we found that participants explored objects more extensively when judging gloss than when judging lightness. These findings suggest a strategic prioritisation of relevant cues for gloss judgments, with participants using larger movements and object rotation to enhance viewing perspectives and highlight detection. Our findings show that exploration behaviours are task-dependent, with actions adapted to the demands of the perceptual task at hand.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Tactile suppression stems from sensation-specific sensorimotor predictions

The ability to sample sensory information with our hands is crucial for smooth and efficient interactions with the world. Despite this important role of touch, tactile sensations on a moving hand are perceived weaker than when presented on the same but stationary hand.1-3 This phenomenon of tactile suppression has been explained by predictive mechanisms, such as forward models, that estimate future sensory states of the body on the basis of the motor command and suppress the associated predicted sensory feedback.4 The origins of tactile suppression have sparked a lot of debate, with contemporary accounts claiming that suppression is independent of predictive mechanisms and is instead akin to unspecific gating.5 Here, we target this debate and provide evidence for sensation-specific tactile suppression due to sensorimotor predictions. Participants stroked with their finger over textured surfaces that caused predictable vibrotactile feedback signals on that finger. Shortly before touching the texture, we applied external vibrotactile probes on the moving finger that either matched or mismatched the frequency generated by the stroking movement. We found stronger suppression of the probes that matched the predicted sensory feedback. These results show that tactile suppression is not limited to unspecific gating but is specifically tuned to the predicted sensory states of a movement.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Sensorimotor temporal recalibration: the contribution of motor-sensory and inter-sensory components

Adaptation to delays between actions and sensory feedback is important for efficiently interacting with our environment. Adaptation may rely on predictions of action-feedback pairing (motor-sensory component), or predictions of tactile-proprioceptive sensation from the action and sensory feedback of the action (inter-sensory component). Reliability of temporal information might differ across sensory feedback modalities (e.g. auditory or visual), influencing adaptation. Here, we investigated the role of motor-sensory and inter-sensory components on sensorimotor temporal recalibration for motor-auditory events (button press-tone) and motor-visual events (button press-Gabor patch). In the adaptation phase of the experiment, the motor action-feedback event pairs were presented with systematic temporal delays (0ms or 150ms). In the subsequent test phase, sensory feedback of the action were presented with variable delays. The participants were then asked whether this delay could be detected. To disentangle motor-sensory from inter-sensory component, we varied movements (active button press or passive depression of button) at adaptation and test. Our results suggest that motor-auditory recalibration is mainly driven by motor-sensory component, whereas motor-visual recalibration is mainly driven by inter-sensory component. Recalibration transferred from vision to audition, but not from audition to vision. These results indicate that motor-sensory and inter-sensory components of recalibration are weighted in a modality-dependent manner.

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↗