There are many opportunities for visual and tactile interactions with fabrics in daily life, and there have been many studies on visual and tactile evaluation of fabrics. However, there are few studies of how the visual and tactile stimuli influence the recognition of fabrics based on short-term memory. This study examines how the memory of fabric texture is retained and is transferred between visual and haptic perceptions by intra- and inter-modal recognition experiments. Fabric was recognized under both haptic and visual single-modal conditions. Visual recognition was superior to haptic recognition under single-modal conditions, consisting of visual learning followed by a visual test and haptic learning followed by haptic test. The inter-modal experiment showed that the cross-modal recognition of fabric was possible, regardless of the order of encoding and recalling fabrics by touch or visually. Therefore, single common cross-modal representation is used when fabrics are recognized.
In this study, a composite fabric was prepared by combining nanofiber having an extremely high specific surface area with nanosized carbon black (CB) having a solute adsorption capacity to purify contaminated water. The nanofiber fabric made of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) with a mean fiber diameter of 400 nm was used as a base material. The CB particles with an original size of 20 nm were used as adsorbent and dispersed in pure water at the concentration of 10 g/L. Before preparation, the CB particles were oxidized by mixing CB with 70% nitric acid at a ratio of 1 g to 1 mL and heating for 2 hours with agitation. The surface of CB particles became hydrophilic by oxidization, and the size of CB particles became the original one in the dispersion. The nanofiber fabric was immersed in the CB dispersion and shaken for 2 hours. After taking out and rinsing it lightly, CB was immobilized on the surface of nanofibers by heating for 1 hour at 150 °C. The adsorption performances of the different CB particles and the prepared CB-supported PAN nanofiber fabrics were evaluated by the static adsorption test using methylene blue (MB) as an adsorbate. The saturated adsorption amount of the oxidized CB-supported PAN nanofiber fabric was as high as 96.2 mg/g. The dynamic adsorption test of MB was also carried out on the untreated CB-supported PAN nanofiber fabric and the oxidized CB-supported PAN nanofiber fabric. Model equations based on the pseudo-first-kinetic model were derived to analyze the various parameters of the dynamic adsorption. The obtained results suggested a potential application of the oxidized CB-supported PAN nanofiber fabric in the contaminated water treatment field.