This exploratory study was designed to examine the effects of visual experience and specific texture parameters on both discriminative and aesthetic aspects of tactile perception. To this end, the authors conducted two experiments using a novel behavioral (ranking) approach in blind and (blindfolded) sighted individuals. Groups of congenitally blind, late blind, and (blindfolded) sighted participants made relative stimulus preference, aesthetic appreciation, and smoothness or softness judgment of two-dimensional (2D) or three-dimensional (3D) tactile surfaces through active touch. In both experiments, the aesthetic judgment was assessed on three affective dimensions, Relaxation, Hedonics, and Arousal, hypothesized to underlie visual aesthetics in a prior study. Results demonstrated that none of these behavioral judgments significantly varied as a function of visual experience in either experiment. However, irrespective of visual experience, significant differences were identified in all these behavioral judgments across the physical levels of smoothness or softness. In general, 2D smoothness or 3D softness discrimination was proportional to the level of physical smoothness or softness. Second, the smoother or softer tactile stimuli were preferred over the rougher or harder tactile stimuli. Third, the 3D affective structure of visual aesthetics appeared to be amodal and applicable to tactile aesthetics. However, analysis of the aesthetic profile across the affective dimensions revealed some striking differences between the forms of appreciation of smoothness and softness, uncovering unanticipated substructures in the nascent field of tactile aesthetics. While the physically softer 3D stimuli received higher ranks on all three affective dimensions, the physically smoother 2D stimuli received higher ranks on the Relaxation and Hedonics but lower ranks on the Arousal dimension. Moreover, the Relaxation and Hedonics ranks accurately overlapped with one another across all the physical levels of softness/hardness, but not across the physical levels of smoothness/roughness. These findings suggest that physical texture parameters not only affect basic tactile discrimination but differentially mediate tactile preferences, and aesthetic appreciation. The theoretical and practical implications of these novel findings are discussed.
Medical image data is critically important for a range of disciplines, including medical image perception research, clinician training programs, and computer vision algorithms, among many other applications. Authentic medical image data, unfortunately, is relatively scarce for many of these uses. Because of this, researchers often collect their own data in nearby hospitals, which limits the generalizabilty of the data and findings. Moreover, even when larger datasets become available, they are of limited use because of the necessary data processing procedures such as de-identification, labeling, and categorizing, which requires significant time and effort. Thus, in some applications, including behavioral experiments on medical image perception, researchers have used naive artificial medical images (e.g., shapes or textures that are not realistic). These artificial medical images are easy to generate and manipulate, but the lack of authenticity inevitably raises questions about the applicability of the research to clinical practice. Recently, with the great progress in Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), authentic images can be generated with high quality. In this paper, we propose to use GAN to generate authentic medical images for medical imaging studies. We also adopt a controllable method to manipulate the generated image attributes such that these images can satisfy any arbitrary experimenter goals, tasks, or stimulus settings. We have tested the proposed method on various medical image modalities, including mammogram, MRI, CT, and skin cancer images. The generated authentic medical images verify the success of the proposed method. The model and generated images could be employed in any medical image perception research.