Haptic Imagery Research Articles

The effects of quality perception and multisensory perception on purchase intention when consumers shop online

PurposeHow to reduce uncertainty in clothing online purchasing has become a primary concern for consumers. This study aims to investigate the effects of quality perception and multisensory perception on consumer online clothing purchase intention and to explore the mediating effect of trust.Design/methodology/approachThis study was conducted with consumers who have online clothing shopping experiences. A total of 539 valid samples were analyzed by bootstrap and structural equation model.FindingsThe result of this research revealed that perceived information quality, perceived service quality, perceived haptic imagery and perceived visual-audio cues have a significant influence on purchase intention. Additionally, consumers’ trust is positively correlated with purchase intention. Trust mediates the relationship between the perceptions (perceived information quality, perceived service quality, perceived haptic imagery and perceived visual-audio cues) and purchase intention, irrespectively.Originality/valueTo investigate the effects of multisensory perception on purchase intention, perceived haptic imagery is adopted as a variable in this study. This study investigates the mediating role of trust between multisensory perception and purchase intention. The findings of this study can enrich Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework and Information System (IS) success model in the field of clothing online shopping.

Social commerce in the social media age: understanding how interactive commerce enhancements navigate app continuance intention

PurposeBy integrating the Uses and Gratifications Theory and Flow Theory, this research seeks to untwine the veiled effects of interactive commerce enhancements (ICEs), specifically haptic imagery and social presence, in promoting user immersion and sustaining social commerce (SC) users' usage intention, considering the moderating role of autotelic personality.Design/methodology/approachThe research utilized purposive sampling of Malaysian SC app users with recent transactions. A dual-source data collection approach, encompassing offline and online channels, was employed to ensure a broad and diverse respondent pool. Partial least squares–structural equation modeling was chosen for its adeptness in analyzing complex relationships in predictive studies.FindingsThe findings revealed the significant positive effects of haptic imagery and social presence on user immersion and continuance intention within SC apps. Social presence and immersion were found to mediate the proposed paths. Additionally, autotelic personality traits were identified as moderators, influencing the strength of these relationships.Originality/valueThis research makes a unique contribution by addressing critical gaps in SC environments, extending the concept of ICEs, understanding the impacts of underlying mediators and pioneering the examination of autotelic personality traits' moderating effects. It introduces a fresh perspective on how individual differences impact user engagement. This groundbreaking study benefits social media and interactive marketing literature by comprehensively understanding how ICEs elevate SC, fostering innovation and heightened engagement.

Touch and Go

This issue of Screen Bodies features articles that contribute to a group of closely related critical concerns, namely, the existential and political significance of tacticity, feeling, and the representation of embodied experience. In her article, “Feeling Like Death,” Caitlin Wilson examines the aesthetic strategies Agnes Varda employs in two early films, La Pointe Courte (1955) and Le Bonheur (1965), that emphasize “textures and tactility” in the portrayal of mortality, death, and mourning. Wilson shows how Varda uses haptic imagery and calculated cinematic techniques to convey an experience of grief that is “palpable as well as visible.” Wilson persuasively argues that Varda depicts the embodied feeling of mortality to create a heightened sense of intimacy between the films’ characters. Similarly, in her timely article, “Gut Feelings,” Jennifer Jasmine White argues that Sheena Patel challenges the trend towards emotional indifference or “flatness” in the emerging genre of “internet novels.” In contrast to the affectless, numb, and apathetic heroine characteristic of novels like Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts (2021) and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Patel's I'm a Fan (2022) features a more realistically emotional protagonist. White argues that the novel functions as an intervention that opposes affective indifference and the political apathy it inspires. She writes that most examples of the so-called internet novel, that is, literature that focuses on social media, influencer culture, and characters who are chronically online, suggest highly mediated social experience leads to emotional and political malaise. Patel rejects this trend and instead centers “the feeling body,” the embodied experience of life online, and the political agency it fosters.

Conveying product weight in digital media using a hand image

The present research examines the role of the image of a hand in an online product evaluation. Through eleven studies (i.e., six in the manuscript and five in the Web Appendix), we show that, when a hand image is depicted in an unsupported holding position (i.e., lifting a product), consumers’ confidence in their judgment of the product's weight is enhanced. This outcome increases product evaluation, purchase intention, and product choice. The hand image effect is mediated by a mental representation of a haptic experience (i.e., haptic imagery). Additionally, we show that an image of a hand in an unsupported holding position increases consumers’ confidence in the product's weight, while other hand positions or their absence do not have a similar impact. Online retailers can use our findings to employ hand images to influence the evaluations and purchase intentions of products in which weight is a salient haptic attribute.

가상현실(VR) 패션 스토어 환경에서의 소비자 휴리스틱 정보처리과정의 구조모델

Background/Objectives: This study aims to estimate the structural model of consumer heuristic information processing in the context of virtual reality(VR) fashion store. Specific objectives are to identify underlying dimensions of mental imagery, to examine the effect of mental imagery on telepresence, and to predict consumer choice heuristic for purchasing fashion products in the VR store environment
 Methods: The VR store of fashion brand X was selected as a stimulus in the VR experiment. A self-administered questionnaire was developed to measure mental imagery, telepresence and choice heuristics. By online survey, a total of 319 usable responses was obtained from consumers (female=169, males=150) who were aged from 20 to 39 years old.
 Results: The mental imagery was consisted of three factors, such as elaboration, haptic imagery, and spatial imagery. Estimated structural model showed that the elaboration and spatial imagery had positive effects on telepresence. Also, the telepresence influenced choice heuristics(e.g., intuition based heuristic and experience based heuristic), suggesting the mediating effect of telepresence between mental imagery and choice heuristics for fashion products at the VR store.
 Conclusion/Implications: This study provides insights into understanding mechanism of information processing in the VR experience. Also, managerial implications were discussed for applications of VR technology into strategic retail management in the fashion markets.

Effects of haptic imagery on purchase intention

Abstract The COVID‑19 pandemic has increased the popularity of online shopping, and companies are looking for ways to provide consumers with experiences that online shopping cannot provide, such as touching products and imagining them in use. In this context, the importance of haptic imagery of products showcased online is increasing. This study replicated and extended Peck et al.’s (2013, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 23, 189–196) finding that physical control and psychological ownership mediate the influence of haptic imagery on purchase intention. This study showed that imagining touching a product increased purchase intention through the mediation of physical control and psychological ownership compared with not imagining, conceptually replicating Peck et al.’s study. This study also examined the moderating effect of product involvement and showed that there was no moderator role of product involvement. The findings would have a practical application in marketing, such as encouraging consumers to imagine touching the product.

How multisensory perception promotes purchase intent in the context of clothing e-customisation.

With the continuing development of internet technologies, an increasing number of consumers want to customise the products they buy online. In order to explore the relationship between perception and purchase intent, a conceptual framework was developed that was based on the link between multisensory perception, positive emotions, and purchase intent in fashion e-customisation marketing. We discuss the outcomes derived from consumers' experiences in fashion e-customisation and analyse the relationships between variables. Questionnaires were used to collect data for this quantitative study (n = 398 participants). The data was analysed using factor analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. The findings contribute to the field of clothing e-customisation by identifying the effects of visual perception, haptic imagery, and auditory stimulation on arousal, and purchase intent. Visual perception and haptic imagery exerted a positive influence over dominance. We also identify the effects of arousal and dominance on purchase intent, and assess the mediating effects of these variables on visual perception, haptic mental imagery, and purchase intent. The results highlight how fashion e-customisation marketing strategies can be adopted by managers in order to increase positive emotions and how multisensory perception can potentially be used to influence consumers' purchase behaviour.

Mobile shopping decision comfort using augmented reality: the effects of perceived augmentation and haptic imagery

PurposeVirtual try-on apps (VTOs) allow consumers to examine fashion and furniture items in usage context without going to a physical store. But the adoption of such apps has varied across product categories, and research on user acceptance of AR marketing has been fragmented. The current study aims to develop and test a general model that explains the formation of decision comfort (DC) in the majority of AR try-on experiences for mobile shopping.Design/methodology/approachAfter reviewing 30 VTOs available on the iOS app store, the authors chose the Wanna Kicks sneaker shopping VTO as the most representative to test their hypotheses for AR try-on in general. Overall, 178 online consumers performed a sneaker shopping task on their mobile devices, and their responses were analyzed with the partial least squares method.FindingsThe study confirmed the key role of perceived augmentation in leading to DC via a utilitarian and a hedonic path. These effects were attenuated for younger users, and haptic imagery only had a utilitarian impact. Scholars should pay more attention to the variable of age, while managers should act quickly to enhance the basic AR affordances of mobile try-on apps.Originality/valueThis is the first study of a VTO in the footwear category and with a model that tests age as a moderating variable between antecedents and consumer responses.

Beauty Apps for Digital Self-Monitoring and Self-Tracking: Expressive Gestures and Movements, Negative Moods and Emotions, and Visual and Haptic Imagery

Beauty Apps for Digital Self-Monitoring and Self-Tracking: Expressive Gestures and Movements, Negative Moods and Emotions, and Visual and Haptic Imagery

Need for touch and haptic imagery: An investigation in online fashion shopping

Previous research has found evidence that, due to the lack of sensory experience, shoppers are reluctant to purchase a garment online. Despite the importance of identifying possible compensatory cues for touch information, a lack of attention to this issue has been recognized in the literature. On this premise, this study addresses this research agenda to explain the mechanism by which information presentation influences customers' cognitive evaluations and behavioral responses and the role of individual differences in terms of need for touch (NFT). Specifically, drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S–O-R) paradigm, the study hypothesizes a model investigating whether verbal and pictorial information presentation affect haptic imagery, which in turn is supposed to influence behavioral responses (purchase intention), through a customer's cognitive evaluation (perceived product quality). To validate the research framework, a task-based online experiment was performed. Participants were requested to simulate a purchase experience on an online apparel retailer, after which they completed a questionnaire; 264 valid responses were received. The results support verbal haptic rather than pictorial information as a mechanism influencing haptic imagery and consequently behavioral responses. With regard to NFT, however, the expected moderating effect between haptic imagery, perceived product quality, and purchase intention was not supported.

Potential Impact of Virtual Touching on Endowment and Feelings of Ownership. A Literature Review of Concepts and Scales

AbstractOnline sales increase at incredible paces, all over the world, and so are corresponding marketing efforts. One of the main deterrents of online selling is related to the impossibility of trying or touching products before taking the decision to buy. Previous studies on offline environments have proved that touching products makes people develop a feeling of ownership, a psychological sense of property that has positive consequences on their intention and decision to buy those products. Similar effects, adapted for the online environments, were less investigated, but the very few existent studies suggest that virtually touching a product through tactile interfaces (smartphone, iPad, tablet etc.) could be as important for consumer decisions as the content of the site and product information. Virtual touching could serve as emotional triggers, leading to feelings of ownership and endowment effects in online marketing. However, defining the concept of “virtual touching” is difficult – even the simple association of “touch” and “virtual” seems oximoronic.The purpose of the present study – a literature review type – is to investigate the tactile based creative online marketing, in order to conceptualize and operationalize the variable „virtual touching”, thus being able to further suggest a research design which would enable us to measure the impact of online „touching” on consumer behaviour. The main analysed constructs related to virtual touching are: endowment effect, psychological ownership, haptic advertising, sensory online marketing, haptic imagery, haptic technology, reverse electrovibration.

From Paragone to Symbiosis. Sensations of In-Betweenness in Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson

Abstract Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), an homage to the Argentine tango, situated in-between autobiography and fiction, creates multiple passages between art and life, the corporeal and the spiritual, emotional involvement and professional detachment. The romance story of filmmaker Sally Potter and dancer Pablo Verón is also readable as an allegory of interart relations, a dialogue of the gaze and the image, a process evolving from paragone to symbiosis. Relying on the strategies of dancefilm elaborated by Erin Brannigan (2011), the paper examines the intermedial relationship between film and dance in their cine-choreographic entanglement. Across scenes overflowing with passion, the film’s haptic imagery is reinforced by the black-and-white photographic image and culminates in a tableau moment that foregrounds the manifold sensations of in-betweenness and feeling of “otherness” that the protagonists experience, caught in-between languages, cultures, and arts.1

Touching Products Virtually: Facilitating Consumer Mental Imagery with Gesture Control and Visual Presentation

Gesture-based interaction has greatly changed the way in which we interact with online products by allowing users to control digital systems with hand movements. This study investigates how gesture-based interaction modes, namely, mid-air gesture and touchscreen gesture, compared with mouse-based interaction, affect consumers’ virtual product experiences (VPE) by eliciting mental imagery (i.e., haptic imagery and spatial imagery). Furthermore, we explore how visual product presentation can be designed to facilitate different types of interaction modes. Through a lab experiment, we find that touchscreen gesture outper- forms mid-air gesture and mouse-based interaction in terms of eliciting haptic imagery, and this effect is mitigated when 3D presentation is used. We also find that mid-air gesture outperforms touchscreen gesture and mouse-based interaction in terms of eliciting spatial imagery when 3D presentation is used. Both haptic imagery and spatial imagery can further reduce consumers’ product uncertainty. Our results extend prior work on interactivity design of VPE and further contribute to the emerging literature on gesture-based interaction.

‘Skin Portraiture’ in the Age of Bio Art

In this article, I consider ‘skin portraiture’: a mode of representation that privileges quasi-anonymous, fragmented, magnified and anatomized images of skin. I argue that this mode of representation permits a heightened awareness of embodied experiences such as reflexivity, empathy and relationality. Expanding understandings of difference through its engagement with haptic imagery and visuality, skin portraiture reorients the boundaries between ‘I’/‘not I’ and subject/object – often through touch – and challenges the cultural commitment to traditional notions of bodily autonomy. By doing so, skin portraiture functions as an antagonistic form of portraiture; that is, as a kind of anti-portraiture that pushes the genre into an expanded visual field and, at times, beyond representation. Exploring the skin-as-technology metaphor, I show that bio art skin portraiture creates chimeric skins through tissue culturing practices, permitting bodies to become radically relational. Bio art skin portraits celebrate the genetic and cellular differences between bodies through a visible collapse of epidermal boundaries, which engenders a hyper-haptic mode of seeing beyond the subject and her or his skin. Analysing the bio art of Jalia Essaïdi, ORLAN and Julia Reodica, and drawing on the work of Laura Marks and Erin Manning, this article explores the skin-as-technology metaphor in order to offer the arts and humanities an innovative understanding of contemporary embodiment.

Effects of Haptic Imagery and Effectance Motivation on Psychological Ownership

Effects of Haptic Imagery and Effectance Motivation on Psychological Ownership

촉각적 심상화를 위한 다중감각 단서가 지각된 소유감에 미치는 영향

촉각적 심상화를 위한 다중감각 단서가 지각된 소유감에 미치는 영향

Do haptic imagery and haptic importance increase psychological ownership for objects?

Do haptic imagery and haptic importance increase psychological ownership for objects?

Creating e-shopping multisensory flow experience through augmented-reality interactive technology

PurposeDrawing on virtual liminoid theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine factors that induce a multisensory flow experience in an e-shopping context through the use of augmented-reality interactive technology (ARIT).Design/methodology/approachTo validate the research framework, a task-based laboratory study was performed. Participants were recruited through a snowball e-mail method and requested to freely and independently use ARIT for clothes fitting in the laboratory, after which they completed a questionnaire; 336 valid responses were received.FindingsEmpirical results revealed that three decorating psychological states (sense of body ownership, sense of ownership control, and self-explorative engagement) directly induced a multisensory flow experience. Furthermore, two multisensory factors (sense of self-location and haptic imagery) mediated the multisensory flow experience through these three decorating psychological states.Practical implicationsConsumers not only rely on generating self-display for optimal fitting in virtual avatar decoration in an e-shopping context but also concentrate more on expression and control of self-body. As consumers’ decorating psychological states require an ideal form of self-expression, a high degree of autonomy in exploring self-decoration options will create more value for consumers. Considering that expressing and controlling the self-body in addition to self-explorative engagement in virtual avatar decoration will trigger the flow experience in an e-shopping context, increasing the use of multisensory ARIT to trigger decorating psychological states in e-shopping contexts is highly recommended.Originality/valueIn this study, a relationship was constructed among virtual liminoid theory, flow theory, and multisensory technology, and an integrated conceptual framework was developed for the relationship between decorating psychological states and multisensory flow experience.

Digital Visceral: Textural Play and the Flamboyant Gesture in Digital Screen Violence

:Digital screen violence is frequently characterized by an increased flamboyance, abstraction, and textural play more familiar from histories of exploitation cinema and the repeatable logic of videogames and YouTube mash-ups. This article analyzes the aesthetic characteristics and the phenomenological appeals of this recent evolution in screen violence, mapping an audio-visual field that is persistently marked by a play between haptic imagery and geometric abstraction.

商品を触るイメージと触覚の重要性が商品に対する所有感の生起に及ぼす影響

Previous research has shown that people hold a higher value for objects that they own, a phenomenon commonly known as the endowment effect. Studies suggest that even without actual ownership, merely touching an object can increase its psychological ownership, which produces the endowment effect. However, touchable commodities are not always available prior to purchase (e.g., during online shopping). When an individual is unable to touch an object, its psychological ownership can be increased with mental imagery of touching it. Imagining touching an object, also known as haptic imagery, has a similar effect on psychological ownership as physical touch, due to a difference in the perception of control. Imagining touching an object results in greater feelings of physical control compared to not imagining touching it. Factors that contribute to the effect of haptic imagery on psychological ownership remain unexplored. In this study, we examined whether haptic importance of objects could impact the effect of haptic imagery on psychological ownership when touch was unavailable. Participants were assigned to the haptic imagery condition or the no-imagery condition. They were asked to look at a piece of paper that introduced an object as if they were considering buying it. Participants in the haptic imagery condition were instructed to imagine holding the object in their hands and to think about how it would feel, keeping their eyes closed throughout the process. Subsequently, all participants were asked to fill out the questionnaire about psychological ownership, perceived control, and familiarity. Results showed a significant effect of haptic imagery on psychological ownership and perceived control, regardless of haptic importance of objects. In addition, when touch is unavailable, an individual痴 psychological ownership of objects with low haptic importance can be more than those with high haptic importance. These findings are applicable to product marketing, specifically for online e-commerce stores.