Multisensory evaluation of the paper products

The tradition in evaluating the paper products has been making the assessment sense by sense. The subjective evaluations of the products have been focused on visual assessments as they support the quality control during the printing process. Recently the focus in print product development has been shifting towards brand building and mental impressions, and thus, methodology for the subjective evaluation of tactile properties has been developed. The next development trend is obviously towards evaluation of multisensory perception. Multisensory evaluation of paper products is essential in order to understand the overall experience the product evokes in the end-use. The purposes of this work was to study visual and haptic perception and their possible interaction with paper roughness discrimination tasks. The study was conducted further to the multisensory evaluation of paper products where all senses are involved. Furthermore the impressions that the product evokes in the end-user were connected to sensory results. In paper roughness discrimination tasks no interaction between vision and touch was found. Discrimination performance where both vision and touch were used and the roughness evaluation based on touch was found superior to other conditions. The information from unattended modality was applied if attended sensory system could not provide enough details to make a judgment. In the end-use situation all modalities are involved, thus multisensory evaluation is needed. A novel way of presenting the results, where the results of multisensory evaluation of printed products are combined with the images evoked from the product, has been developed