Visual and tactile cross-modal mere exposure effects

Abstract

The affective system enables people to perceive and judge the emotional content of stimuli from various sensory modalities. Cross-modal interactions in affective processes, however, are less well understood. Using novel three-dimensional objects, we investigated cross-modal mere exposure effects between vision and touch. Previewing objects increased the preference judged by hand, while pre-touching did not modulate the preference judged by vision. Moreover, these effects were found to be independent of recognition performance, suggesting a dissociation between affective and cognitive processing. Our demonstration of a cross-modal mere exposure effect suggests that the affective system integrates inputs from visual and tactile modalities asymmetrically.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by a JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists to the first author (No. 184848) and by a MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research to the second author (No. 18650063).

The authors would like to thank Dr. Kristen Ruys and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and assistance on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

¹The pictures of the objects are available on request by sending an e-mail to the corresponding author.