When textures meet: Relational evaluations explain overall pleasantness beyond component pleasantness.

In everyday touch, the hand often contacts multiple surfaces simultaneously. Yet little is known about how pleasantness is formed when texture pairs are explored at the same time. Previous research has shown that tactile signals presented to adjacent fingers can be integrated through averaging or assimilation processes. These accounts primarily address the integration of stimulus attributes and do not consider whether relations between textures may also contribute to evaluative judgments. The present study examined this possibility by obtaining ratings on five relational dimensions (similarity, contrast, harmony, emergence, and modulation) and testing whether these ratings helped explain the overall pleasantness of texture pairs beyond the mean pleasantness of the component textures. Across three experiments, participants evaluated the pleasantness of texture pairs, judged relational qualities between textures, and rated the tactile attributes of individual textures. The results showed that overall pleasantness could not be fully explained by the average pleasantness of the component textures. Instead, ratings on these relational dimensions-particularly similarity and contrast-provided additional explanatory power for overall pleasantness. Together, these findings suggest that the texture combination itself contributes to pleasantness in paired touch beyond the pleasantness of the component textures alone.