EFFECT OF EXPECTATION ON AFFECTIVE QUALITY PERCEPTION

A user's experience of a product involves a set of transitions from one sensory state to another. In such state transitions, a disconfirmation between prior expectation and posterior experience evokes emotions such as surprise, satisfaction, and disappointment. A noteworthy phenomenon in the perception of expectation disconfirmation is that the expectation affects the perceived experience itself. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model of the expectation effect. We hypothesize that amount of expected information, i.e. entropy, determines the occurrence of the expectation effect and that the amount of gained information is positively correlated with the intensity of the effect. We further hypothesize that a conscious level of expectation discrepancy distinguishes between two types of expectation effect, namely, assimilation and contrast. To verify these hypotheses, we conducted an experiment in which participants responded to the tactile qualities of surface texture. Based on our hypotheses, we analyzed the causes of the visual expectation effect on tactile roughness during a sensory modality transition from vision to touch and found the appropriateness of the proposed model.