The Role of Prior Knowledge and Visual Cues on Perceived Softness

2023-2-06
KILIÇ, Fatma
Haptic perception is the active exploration of materials by touch. When exploring objects, we use stereotypical hand movements called ‘Exploratory Procedures’ (EPs, Lederman & Klatzky, 1987). These EPs are related to the specific material and task properties, such as rubbing a jersey to assess its softness. Softness of a material has been treated as a single dimension and in fact identified with compliance (Lederman & Klatzky, 1987; Baumgartner, 2013; Di Luca, 2016). However, it has recently been shown that perceived softness is multidimensional, and people use specific EPs for perceptual softness dimensions (Dövencioğlu et al., 2022). The aim of this thesis is to understand how much prior knowledge, and visual cues account for the specific EPs associated with softness dimensions. Are the EPs based on the prior knowledge of observations and information that is learned? Or do people infer material properties from the current visual information that they obtain from the material? In Experiment 1, how much prior knowledge and visual cues affect the softness judgments in the absence of haptic sensory input was investigated. Here, it was observed that there can be material- and adjective-specific differences between prior knowledge and visual cues. Experiments 2 and 3 aimed to understand how the appearance of EPs affects the softness perception of a material. It was found that a congruent EP that is correlated with the same dimension as the material yielded different ratings compared to an incongruent EP. This difference was observed partially for the adjectives that are semantically associated with the same dimension.

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Citation Formats
F. KILIÇ, “The Role of Prior Knowledge and Visual Cues on Perceived Softness,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2023.