Tactile sensitivity alters textile touch perception

Tactility plays a crucial role in our interactions with the physical world including our ability to differentiate textile textures and their associated comfort. There is an increasing focus on digitally interactive haptic experiences enabling consumers to feel virtual objects realistically. This could revolutionize how we experience textiles in e-commerce platform, virtual and augmented reality, and shape the future of textiles in the metaverse. In this study, we examined the impact of tactile sensitivity on touch perception of a large nonhomogeneous sample of 22 textile swatches. The tactile sensitivity was studied using four factors: assessors' "subject-matter expertise", "frequency of performing handiwork", "frequency of working with textiles", and "familiarity of textile textures". The participants noted their tactile assessment of eight touch attributes of textile swatches on a 5-point Likert scale. Through predictive modeling, we analyzed the effect of tactile sensitivity on participants' tactile assessment scores. Our key findings revealed that participants' tactile sensitivity significantly influenced their perception of the textile textures. Notably, the "frequency of working with textiles" had the most substantial impact on participants' tactile ratings followed by their familiarity with textile textures. Interestingly, the perceptual differences of isotropy attribute were significant in all the cases. Overall, there was no significant difference in the tactile ratings between textile experts and non-experts, except for nine occurrences, four of which were related to perceptual differences in roughness of the woven fabrics. Conversely, the two groups had no statistically significant differences at all in their perceptions of hairiness, scratchiness, and uniformity.