Assessing the representational structure of softness activated by words

Abstract Softness is an important material property that can be judged directly, by interacting with an object, but also indirectly, by simply looking at an image of a material. The latter is likely possible by filling in relevant multisensory information from prior experiences with soft materials. Such experiences are thought to lead to associations that make up our representations about perceptual softness. Here, we investigate the structure of this representational space when activated by words, and compare it to haptic and visual perceptual spaces that we obtained in earlier work. To this end, we performed an online study where people rated different sensory aspects of soft materials, presented as written names. We compared the results with the previous studies where identical ratings were made on the basis of visual and haptic information. Correlation and Procrustes analyses show that, overall, the representational spaces of verbally presented materials were similar to those obtained from haptic and visual experiments. However, a classifier analysis showed that verbal representations could better be predicted from those obtained from visual than from haptic experiments. In a second study we rule out that these larger discrepancies in representations between verbal and haptic conditions could be due to difficulties in material identification in haptic experiments. We discuss the results with respect to the recent idea that at perceived softness is a multidimensional construct.