Initial contact shapes the perception of friction

Humans efficiently estimate the grip force necessary to lift a variety of objects, including slippery ones. The regulation of grip force starts with the initial contact and takes into account the surface properties, such as friction. This estimation of the frictional strength has been shown to depend critically on cutaneous information....

Perception of naturalness in textiles

In many daily contexts, we prefer natural ‘materials’ over un-natural ones. Textiles embodied in garments that are worn on the body all day, or in bed sheets slept under every night touch us literally, on a daily basis. Hence among all other materials, ‘naturalness perception’ has a strong impact on the preference for textile products....

Cross-modal visuo-haptic mental rotation: Comparing objects between senses

The simple experience of a coherent percept while looking and touching an object conceals an intriguing issue: different senses encode and compare information in different modality-specific reference frames. We addressed this problem in a cross-modal visuo-haptic mental rotation task. Two objects in various orientations were presented at the...