The Concept of Psychotextiles; Interactions between Changing Patterns and the Human Visual Brain, by a Novel Composite SMART Fabric.

George K. Stylios,Meixuan Chen

doi:10.3390/ma13030725

Abstract

A new SMART fabric concept is reported in which visual changes of the material are designed to influence different human emotions. This is achieved by developing a novel electrochromic composite yarn, knitted into pattern-changing fabrics, which has high response in temperature change and uniform contrast. The influence of these pattern-changing effects on the response of the human visual brain is investigated further by using event-related potential (ERP). Four SMART pattern-changing fabric pairs were used in this experiment. Each fabric presents two patterns interactively with different, but complementary or opposing, pattern attributes. 20 participants took part in the experiment, in which they were exposed to the patterns, while their visual brain activities were recorded. Comparisons of the three prominent ERP components; P1, N1, and P2 that correspond to the two patterns of each fabric have shown significant differences in the latency and amplitude of these components. These differences show that patterns and pattern-changing cause different visual impacts and that these changes influence our level of attention and processing effort. The study concludes that with the pattern changing ability of these thermochromic hybrid materials we can create designs with attributes that can directly manipulate user emotions, which we like to call ‘psychotextiles’. Our study also poses much wider questions of our image processing process in relation to design and art.

Highlights

Recent advances of SMART textiles enable researchers to explore new ways of interaction with users
In component P2, significant difference was found in the latency in the O2. These results show that the difference in intensity of the fabric patterns causes different visual channel location meaning that Pattern 1a triggers an earlier P2 than Pattern 1b in the right side of the brain responses, in which clearer and well-defined patterns evoke an earlier and larger event-related potential (ERP)
The yarn was subsequently knitted into four fabric pattern pairs testing geometry, asymmetry, and intensity, of our visual brain, at O1 and O2 electrodes positioned at the back of our brain

Summary

Introduction

Recent advances of SMART textiles enable researchers to explore new ways of interaction with users. Pattern, and shape-changing effects of SMART fabrics are capable for interaction with our emotional responses [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Most of these designs focus on exploring SMART fabrics capability rather than designing them to actively influence any emotional user response. This study aims to investigate whether it is possible to pre-determine the pattern design of a novel SMART fabric with pattern-changing properties which would directly influence human visual response. Sharpness of patterns were important; sharp patterns produce quicker visual

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Conclusion