Visual and tactile cross-modal mere exposure effects

The affective system enables people to perceive and judge the emotional content of stimuli from various sensory modalities. Cross-modal interactions in affective processes, however, are less well understood. Using novel three-dimensional objects, we investigated cross-modal mere exposure effects between vision and touch. Previewing objects increased the preference judged by hand, while pre-touching did not modulate the preference judged by vision. Moreover, these effects were found to be independent of recognition performance, suggesting a dissociation between affective and cognitive processing. Our demonstration of a cross-modal mere exposure effect suggests that the affective system integrates inputs from visual and tactile modalities asymmetrically.