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“Handshaking parties,” where pop idols shake hands with fans, can be exciting. The multimodal stimulation of tactile, visual, and auditory sensations can be captivating. In this study, we presented subjects with stimuli eliciting three sensory responses: tactile, visual, and auditory sensations. We found that the attraction scores of subjects increased because they felt the smoothness and obtained a human-like sensory experience grasping a grip handle covered with artificial skin, faux fur, and abrasive cloth with their dominant hand as they looked at a picture of a pop idol or listened to a song. When no pictures or songs were presented, a simple feeling of slight warmth was correlated with the attraction score. Results suggest that multimodal stimuli alter tactile sensations and the feelings evoked. This finding may be useful for designing materials that activate the human mind through tactile sensation and for developing humanoid robots and virtual reality systems.
Kumagai et al. (Sat,) studied this question.