The use of natural language to communicate the perception of vibrotactile stimuli

Abstract

This study explores the subjective use of adjectives to verbally communicate vibrotactile stimulation across multiple frequencies. In total, nine different vibrotactile stimulus frequencies (10–300 Hz) were utilized, and subjective evaluation methods, which involved adjectives, were used to assess the sensory representations of the participants (18 healthy male participants; mean age, 22.9 years; standard deviation, 3.5). Sensory terms such as ‘slow,’ ‘protruding,’ and ‘thick’ were used as representative expressions to describe low-frequency (10–100 Hz) vibrotactile stimulations, while ‘fast,’ ‘shallow,’ and ‘tickly’ were used to describe high-frequency (225–300 Hz) vibrotactile stimulations. At the frequencies of 150 and 200 Hz, no characteristic word was found because there was no difference in subjective evaluation scores from other low or high frequencies. The results suggest that vibrotactile stimulation at different frequencies induce diverse sensory representations, owing to not only the motion and shape of the stimuli but also the subjective responses of the perceivers. The results of this study could be utilized in developing affective haptic devices in the future.

Keywords:

• Vibration frequency
• sensory representations
• subjective evaluation methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Mid-career Researcher Program Grant through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) [No. 2017R1A2B2004629].