2020 Volume 41 Issue 1 Pages 189-195
Shitsukan is a Japanese word that means ``a sense of quality.'' Shitsukan includes visual qualities such as ``glossiness'' and ``translucency''; acoustic qualities such as ``brightness'' ``sharpness'' and ``pitch''; tactile qualities such as ``roughness'' and ``hardness''; aspects of materials themselves such as ``glass,'' ``cloth,'' ``wood,'' ``stone,'' ``metal,'' and ``pearl''; and affective properties such as ``prettiness,'' ``fragility,'' ``expensiveness,'' ``preference,'' ``naturalness,'' and ``genuineness.'' Thus, a wide range of concepts has been examined with respect to the Shitsukan perception. It is also important to note that Shitsukan perception is not merely the processing of information input through various sensory modalities; it also results from multimodal, adaptive, and active processes including prediction, decision-making, body motor control, and sensory-motor feedback. In this review, I would like to introduce the following three studies that my collaborators and I have recently conducted. 1) Auditory modulation of material properties of food by pseudo-mastication feedback sound generated from electromyogram signal; 2) Perception of the material properties of wood based on vision, audition, and touch; and 3) The rules of audiovisual integration in human perception of materials.