Discrimination characteristics for fabrics at neck and hand

Abstract

We conducted experiments to investigate the human ability to discriminate fabrics. In the first experiment, we examined the discrimination ability at the neck and at the fingers, and found that subjects typically could not discriminate the size of a knitted stitch at their necks as precisely as at their fingers. This result is reasonable considering that the density of human mechanoreceptors is higher in the fingers. However, many people are sensitive to the texture of mufflers. We then conducted another experiment to find the rate at which subjects felt a fabric was scratchy. In this case, we found that the subjects tended to discriminate the kind of material more sensitively at their necks than at their fingers.