Memory influences haptic perception of softness

The memory of an object’s property (e.g. its typical colour) can affect its visual perception. We investigated whether memoryof the softness of every-day objects influences their haptic perception. We produced bipartite silicone rubber stimuli: one half of the stimuli was covered with a layer of an object (sponge, wood, tennis ball, foam ball); the other half was uncovered silicone. Participants were not aware of the partition. They first used their bare finger to stroke laterally over the covering layer to recognize the well-known object and then indented the other half of the stimulus with a probe to compare its softness to that of an uncovered silicone stimulus. Across four experiments with different methods we showed that silicon stimuli covered with a layer of rather hard objects (tennis ball and wood) were perceived harder than the same silicon stimuli when being covered with a layer of rather soft objects (sponge and foam ball), indicating that haptic perception of softness is affected by memory.

There are zip files for every experiment (1-4), which contain all data relative to the publication. Variables of all experiments are described in the file VARIABLE_CODES.txt.