Correlation between the sensorial perception and the descriptive instrumental analysis of two descriptors of orthogonal touch (hardness and tackiness descriptors) (original) (raw)
The use of physical property data to predict the touch perception of materials
2012
This paper examines whether the physical properties of materials can be useful predictors of psychophysical properties of materials. In this study psychophysical methods were employed to study the link between the measured surface roughness, elastic modulus and thermal effusivity and the perceptual qualities of roughness, hardness and coldness, for a diverse set of materials (woods, polymers and metals). A strong positive correlation was found between the physical and the psychophysical properties of materials that determine touch perception. Furthermore, by analysing the data in which vision of the sample was controlled, it was found that in some cases there is a shift in touch perception between the sighted and unsighted condition that affects polymer samples most strongly.
Quantifying touch–feel perception: tribological aspects
Measurement Science and Technology, 2008
We report a new investigation into how surface topography and friction affect human touch-feel perception. In contrast with previous work based on micro-scale mapping of surface mechanical and tribological properties, this investigation focuses on the direct measurement of the friction generated when a fingertip is stroked on a test specimen. A special friction apparatus was built for the in-situ testing, based on a linear flexure mechanism with both contact force and frictional force measured simultaneously. Ten specimens, already independently assessed in a 'perception clinic', with materials including natural wood, leather, engineered plastics and metal were tested and the results compared with the perceived rankings. Because surface geometrical features are suspected to play a significant role in perception, a second set of samples, all of one material were prepared and tested in order to minimise the influence of properties such as hardness and thermal conductivity. To minimise subjective effects, all specimens were also tested in a roller-on-block configuration based upon the same friction apparatus, with the roller materials being steel, brass and rubber. This paper reports the detailed design and instrumentation of the friction apparatus, the experimental set up and the friction test results. Attempts have been made to correlate the measured properties and the perceived feelings for both roughness and friction. The results show that the measured roughness and friction coefficient both have a strong correlation with the rough-smooth and grippy-slippery feelings.
Haptic Discrimination of Different Types of Soft Materials
Springer eBooks, 2022
We interact with different types of soft materials on a daily basis such as salt, hand cream, etc. Recently we have shown that soft materials can be described using four perceptual dimensions which are deformability, granularity, viscosity, and surface softness [1]. Here, we investigated whether humans can actually perceive systematic differences in materials that selectively vary along one of these four dimensions as well as how judgments on the different dimensions are correlated to softness judgments. We selected at least two material classes per dimension (e.g., hair gel and hand cream for viscosity) and varied the corresponding feature (e.g., the viscosity of hair gel). Participants ordered four to ten materials from each material class according to their corresponding main feature, and in addition, according to their softness. Rank orders of materials according to the main feature were consistent across participants and repetitions. Rank orders according to softness were correlated either positively or negatively with the judgments along the associated four perceptual dimensions. These findings support our notion of multiple softness dimensions and demonstrate that people can reliably discriminate materials which are artificially varied along each of these softness dimensions.
Surface and Interface Analysis, 2008
One of the objectives of sensorial metrology devices aims to substitute or to reproduce the operating of human organs with a high accuracy. The advantage of such a device is to get rid of the subjective nature of human perceptions. Thus, a probe tack test device has been developed in order to reproduce human tactile exploration, especially the perception of tackiness (or stickiness). Such a device enables, indeed, to study and to quantify mechanically the tackiness of silicone elastomers. However, tackiness can also be considered with a qualitative approach by a touch test. The resulting sensorial analysis requires the achievement of tactile experiments. The descriptive instrumental analysis and the sensorial analysis enable to establish a correlation on the phenomena of adhesion between two different ways of studying tackiness. This report shows that the sensorial perception of tackiness is not necessarily related to the ''tack'' force but also depends on other characteristics of tackiness, such as the energy of adhesion or the ''tack'' distance, which represent respectively the energy required to separate the punch from the sample and the distance between the moment when the force is negative and the moment when the probe is completely separated from the sample.
Polymers
The touch-feel sensation of product surfaces arouses growing interest in various industry branches. To entangle the underlying physical and material parameters responsible for a specific touch-feel sensation, a new measurement system has been developed. This system aims to record the prime physical interaction parameters at a time, which is considered a necessary prerequisite for a successful physical description of the haptic sensation. The measurement setup enables one to measure the dynamic coefficient of friction, the macroscopic contact area of smooth and rough surfaces, the angle enclosed between the human finger and the soft-touch surfaces and the vibrations induced in the human finger during relative motion at a time. To validate the measurement stand, a test series has been conducted on two soft-touch surfaces of different roughness. While the individual results agree well with the literature, their combination revealed new insights. Finally, the investigation of the haptic...
Sensory Analysis Procedures and Viewpoints: Intellectual History, Current Debates, Future Outlooks
Journal of Sensory Studies, 1993
This paper presents the intellectual history of product testing (sensory analysis). It traces the history from two separate streams; the expert (and expert panelist), and the empiricist (sociologist, followed by experimental psychologist). Sensory analysis in the last decade of the 20th century is host to many of the same intellectual arguments in these two fields as were current a half century ago, or longer, in psychology. What has been absent is a set of worldviews and organizing principles around which the field can grow and mature more rapidly. The paper presents three major organizing subject areas for sensory analysis: individual differences (sensory segmentation), sensory-instrumental analysis (reverse engineering), and cognitive approaches (mixed modeling and optimization of physical and conceptual variables). These three subject areas and their organizing principles provide sensory analysis with a vision of future research and application that accord with the scientific heritage and extend current procedures. SENSORY ANALYSIS FROM THE 1920s TO THE 1970s Sensory analysis and product testing have a long and involved history. At times they have been a handmaiden to the R&D function in corporations, deriving their utility from providing answers about the consumer response to a prototype. At other times they struggled to become a science, with their own procedures, data, and methods of interpretation. The growth of the field has not been as smooth as one would have desired. Over the 70-year period there certainly was an increase in the scientific caliber of the research and the generalizability of the findings. But the field has been marked by conflicts of
The finishing touches: the role of friction and roughness in haptic perception of surface coatings
Experimental Brain Research, 2020
Humans are extraordinarily skilled in the tactile evaluation of, and differentiation between, surfaces. The chemical and mechanical properties of these surfaces are translated into tactile signals during haptic exploration by mechanoreceptors in our skin, which are specialized to respond to different types of temporal and mechanical stimulation. Describing the effects of measurable physical characteristics on the human response to tactile exploration of surfaces is of great interest to manufacturers of household materials so that the haptic experience can be considered during design, product development and quality control. In this study, methods from psychophysics and materials science are combined to advance current understanding of which physical properties affect tactile perception of a range of furniture surfaces, i.e., foils and coatings, thus creating a tactile map of the furniture product landscape. Participants' responses in a similarity scaling task were analyzed using INDS-CAL from which three haptic dimensions were identified. Results show that specific roughness parameters, tactile friction and vibrational information, as characterized by a stylus profilometer, a Forceboard, and a biomimetic synthetic finger, are important for tactile differentiation and preferences of these surface treatments. The obtained dimensions are described as distinct combinations of the surface properties characterized, rather than as 'roughness' or 'friction' independently. Preferences by touch were related to the roughness, friction and thermal properties of the surfaces. The results both complement and advance current understanding of how roughness and friction relate to tactile perception of surfaces.
Measuring the Material Properties Related to Human Perceptions
2018
Sensory evaluation has been widely applied in assessing the quality of many consumer products that directly serve human needs such as food, beverages, clothing, etc. This paper first examined the inherent deficiencies in this approach, due mainly to the essentially subjective nature of human sensory preference. It then argued that instinctively designating certain materials attributes as sensory perceptions is unnecessary; considering every scientific concept is in essence the processed results of our sensory organs/brains, i.e., all quantities were initially human perceptions. Scientific advances have inevitably generated gradual transformation of such human perceptions as warmth and heaviness into objective parameters measurable in physical quantities like temperature and kilograms. Then using existing successful examples, it demonstrated firmly how the sensory attributes can be assessed by more reliable instrumental methods, and envisioned the key steps to turning a perception i...
Sensory Evaluation Methods for Tactile Properties of Fabrics
Journal of Sensory Studies, 2007
Sensory evaluation of tactile properties of fabrics is a subject many researchers have studied for years and which still has importance and is also open to improvements. Particularly for suitings, the sensory evaluation of fabric handle or of other tactile properties has a greater importance. This article explains sensory evaluation techniques for stiffness, thickness and smoothness, which are the components of fabric handle of suitings. These sensory techniques are introduced by the authors and studied in 100% worsted wool suitings. The concordances of sensory test results are investigated by Kendall's concordance test, and correlation analyses are carried out to examine the relations between sensory results.
2014
The main purpose of this research consists in developing a pragmatic method, allowing the evaluation and selection of tactile macrotextures associated to subjective user interactions. So, this paper introduces an approach to formalize the relation between emotional values and textures, it is applied in the context of kitchen utensils. At this point we emphasize the importance of the identification and application of the subjective values during the product development by designers, guided by Kansei Engineering process [1]. Indeed, with the evolution of the global industrial sector, many alternatives of materials have been developed throughout decades. It is estimated that there are at least 160.000 different materials available in the world [2]. The development of such a variety has been led for the most diverse products, following the evolution of emerging consumer needs. At the strategic level of the production system, the research and industrial development stand out mainly in a ...
The perception of tactile feeling and corresponding textile attributes worldwide
IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering
The textile industry has been exploring sensory analysis as means to evaluate different products as a strategy to improve product comfort. The sensory analysis uses a set of attributes standardized for sensory evaluation: the lexicons. This paper compares three lexicons developed to assess the sensory comfort of textile fabrics, by researchers from France, Portugal and Brazil. Quantitative Descriptive Analysis was conducted for the development of these lexicons. The study showed that France and Portugal have thirteen attributes in common and seven attributes are common in France, Portugal and Brazil:
Sensation and Perception in Surface Using Kansei Surface Properties , Engineering
2018
Aesthetic properties of a product add significantly to meaning and relevance of a product. In this study, Affective Surface Engineering is used to illustrate and model the link between customer expectations and perception to controllable product surface properties. The results highlight the use of the Soft metrology concept for linking physicaland human factors contributing to the perception of products. In conclusions of the study, future research in Soft metrology is proposed to allow understanding and modelling of product perception and sensations.
Perceptual dimensions of tactile surface texture: A multidimensional scaling analysis
Perception & Psychophysics, 1993
The purpose of this study was to examine the subjective dimensionality of tactile surface texture perception. Seventeen tactile stimuli, such as wood, sandpaper, and velvet, were moved across the index finger of the subject, who sorted them into categories on the basis of perceived similarity. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques were then used to position the stimuli in a perceptual space on the basis of combined data of 20 subjects. A three-dimensional space was judged to give a satisfactory representation of the data. Subjects' ratings of each stimulus on five scales representing putative dimensions of perceived surface texture were then fitted by regression analysis into the MDS space. Roughness-smoothness and hardness-softness were found to be robust and orthogonal dimensions; the third dimension did not correspond closely with any of the rating scales used, but post hoc inspection of the data suggested that it may reflect the compressional elasticity ("springiness") of the surface.
The development and validation of sensory and emotional scales of touch perception
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2011
No comprehensive language exists that describes the experience of touch. Three experiments were conducted to take steps toward establishing a touch lexicon. In Experiment I, 49 participants rated how well 262 adjectives described sensory, emotional and evaluative aspects of touch. In Experiment II, participants rated pairwise dissimilarities of the most descriptive words of the set. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) solutions representing semanticperceptual spaces underlying the words resulted in a touch perception task (TPT) consisting of 26 'sensory' attributes (e.g., bumpiness) and 14 'emotional' attributes (e.g., pleasurable). In Experiment III, 40 participants used the TPT to rate unseen textured materials that were moved actively or received passively against the index fingerpad, volar forearm, and two underarm sites. MDS confirmed similar semantic-perceptual structures in Experiments II and III. Factor analysis of Experiment III data decomposed the sensory attribute ratings into factors labeled Roughness, Slip, Pile and Firmness, and the emotional attribute ratings into Comfort and Arousal factors. Factor scores varied among materials and sites. Greater intensity of sensory and emotional responses were reported when participants passively, as opposed to actively, received stimuli. The sensitivity of the TPT in identifying body site and mode of touch-related perceptual differences affirms the validity and utility of this novel linguistic/perceptual tool.
Design of a Tactile Instrument to Measure Human Roughness Perception in a Virtual Environment
IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, 2000
This paper presents the experimental results on the measurement of human texture perception in virtual environments. The experiment is conducted with a haptic tactile instrument that provides sensations of rough textures directly to the fingertip of the users. It consists of a brush and a DC motor. The brush rubs directly against the user's fingertip. Simulated texture is felt through an aperture on the tactile actuator where the users place their fingertip. The speed and direction of the brush are varied to control the roughness of the virtual surface and to determine the effect of either variable on perceived roughness. The actuator is designed to be attached to an existing force feedback device in order to create an interface that can provide force feedback and tactile feedback. The magnitudes of rough textures are measured through this device by comparing the virtual textures with real sandpapers of different grit sizes. Through human factor testing, it is found that the direction of rotation has negligible effects on roughness perception when the time gap between two consecutive stimuli is as large as 10 s. However, when the time gap is reduced to 0.5 s, the effects of direction become prominent. The just noticeable difference with respect to speed is found to decrease as the base speed of the brush increases. The results also show that although each subject's perception of roughness is biased using various sandpapers, the measured data is divided between two trends. One group of users perceives the roughness to increase with increasing speed, while the other group perceives the roughness to decrease.
Sensory perception of surfaces quality-Industrial practices and prospects
2010
In this paper we carry out a critical analysis of the industrial practices used by the partner firms to control a product's aspect. The group of partners represents many different sectors of activity such as: luxury goods industry, furniture industry, medical equipment (prosthesis), plastic injection and watch-making industry. These practices deal with the identification of aspect anomalies, the evaluation of anomalies severity as well as the decisions about the product's conformity. We will show that current practices do not allow us to decrease the variability of the results frequently observed, because the subjectivity often associated with this kind of control is not eliminated using such methods. In every sector studied, we find the same dissatisfaction about the results obtained. We will then present our approach to sharply decrease this variability. This approach, tested in a famous Swiss watch-making company, is based on sensory analysis concepts. This approach is original due to the breakdown of the visual-control process into three sub-processes: the detection of aspect anomalies, the evaluation of those anomalies and the conformity decision. This approach also includes a metrological organisation and some tools which allow us to measure the efficiency reached. The paper will show how our approach succeeds in meeting the different aims of the partner company group and proposes an initial structured approach for a generic metrological organisation adapted to control the variability during the surface quality control by humans.
Human roughness perception and possible factors effecting roughness sensation
Journal of Texture Studies, 2017
Surface texture sensation is significant for business success, in particular for solid surfaces for most of the materials; including foods, furniture or fabrics. Applications of roughness perception are still unknown, especially under different conditions such as lubricants with varying viscosities, different temperatures, or under different force loads during the observation of the surface. This work aims to determine the effect of those unknown factors, with applied sensory tests on 62 healthy participants. Roughness sensation of fingertip was tested under different lubricants including water and diluted syrup solutions at room temperature (25 o C) and body temperature (37 o C) by using simple pair= wise comparison in order to observe the just noticeable difference threshold and perception levels. Additionally in this research applied force load during roughness observation was tested with pair=wise ranking method to illustrate its possible effect on the human sensation. Obtained results showed that human roughness discrimination capability reduces with an increasing viscosity of the lubricant, where the temperature was not found to be significant. Moreover, the increase in the applied force load showed an increase in the sensitivity of roughness discrimination capability. Observed effects of the applied factors were also used for estimating the oral sensation of texture during eating. These findings are significant for our fundamental understanding to the texture perception, but also could find applications in the material sciences which may include food sciences that needs information about texture perception for the development of new foods with controlled textural features.
Sensory evaluation of the touch of a great number of fabrics
Food Quality and Preference, 2006
Evaluating fabric touch can be a great interest for the industry in order to match the quality needs of the consumer and the parameters of the manufacturing process. The present paper reports the approach of a panel used to categorize the touch of 43 different fabrics obtained through a change of five parameters of fabrication. Incomplete block design was chosen by the panelists for the evaluation of the samples. Analyses of the differences among samples were carried out with ANOVA. The Newman-Keuls test was used to evaluate the influence of the process parameters on the values of four sensorial attributes. The average rating of the attributes evaluated by the panel varied significantly with modification of the yarn count, the yarn torsion or the fabric tightness. This variation follows the textile know how.