An experiment has been made, in which participants grasping the stylus of a robotic arm were physically guided along a jagged or rounded trajectory, and then were asked to associate either trajectory to the word “takete” or “maluma”. A significant preference (nine out of eleven participants) for associating the jagged trajectory to “takete” and the rounded trajectory to “maluma” has been found, indicating the existence of a connectivity between haptic trajectories and words. This result suggests to interaction designers to avoid the association of counter-intuitive labels or verbal meanings to (yet rarely used) structured synthetic kinesthetic messages (“haptons”) that are perceived as jagged or rounded. The experiment complements existing research on cross-modal associations between stimuli belonging to other sensory channels, such as vision or taste, and words having demonstrated verbal equivalence to “takete” and “maluma”. Furthermore, it raises interest on currently unanswered questions about the perceptual importance of temporal aspects in the haptic recognition of shapes by rectilinear or curvilinear contour patterns, and their higher-level decoding and connectivity at cortical level.
