Tactile Beauty Is in the Hand, but Also in the eye of the Beholder: Interaction Between Haptic and Visual Experiences in Aesthetic Judgement

Anecdotal knowledge indicate that beauty is a quality owned only by vision and hearing while other senses, like touch, seems not to be able to generate aesthetic experiences. For example, the aesthetics experience of statues is typically limited to vision while haptic experience is usually discouraged in museums. With such premises, it is relevant to investigate to what extent and how humans experience haptic aesthetics. The goal of this study was to compare haptic and visual aesthetic judgments of three-dimensional objects. Eighty-four participants were asked to explore and rate the pleasantness of 6 tridimensional objects presented either haptically or visually. In the second phase, participants explored with the other modality (vision or haptics) and rated the pleasantness of 12 objects, including the 6 previously explored with the other modality and 6 new ones. Main results show that for shapes are explored twice, haptically and visually, the second exploration produces higher aesthetic ratings, independently from the sensory modalities. While the direction of the crossmodal influence seems bidirectional, correlational analysis indicate that previous visual experience is a predictor of haptic aesthetic experience but not vice versa. These results suggest an association between haptic and visual aesthetics of 3D shapes in which cross-modal associations play a role in the aesthetic experience of haptics and vision. Our findings support the idea that aesthetic responses are multisensory experiences in which stimulation from different modalities is able to influence appreciation rates and, possibly, to contribute to a multimodal representation of the overall aesthetic experience.