Perception, tribology and psychophysics

Purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by the multisensory experience associated with that product. How something looks, smells, tastes, sounds, and feels are important facets of delivering a pleasant experience. Visual cues are highly relevant for brand recognition, and haptic perception is of ever rising interest for the same reason. Understanding how physical properties affect human perception assists in the development of tools to create the experience you want for your customers.

Significant perceptual change with small adjustments

Small changes in the chemical composition or texture of a product can lead to significant differences in people’s perceptual experiences. For tactile perception, this matters for all products that come into contact with the human skin or hand, for example cosmetics, clothes, tissue paper, car-interior surfaces, furniture coatings, glass coatings, or packaging. If you wish to make changes to a product, our expertise can help assess how to make those changes, and how these changes will affect the tactile properties. We can also work with you to improve the tactile qualities of a product and can guide the development process with the eventual perceptual experience in mind.

Our approach to the development of perceptual response

At RISE, we have expertise in physical characterisation, statistics, measuring skin properties, quantifying human perception, and experimental design. Our interdisciplinary approach combines techniques from chemistry, materials science and tribology to characterise relevant physicochemical parameters of products with psychophysical and psychological methods to quantify human perceptual experiences of those products.

We can give you tools to predict perceptual responses using laboratory characterisation, as well as provide knowledge about how to control and modify the properties of your product in order to give your customers a desirable perceptual experience.