Towards the assessment of perceptual style

People may differ in the extent to which they use and rely on their different sensory modalities, i.e. their perceptual styles. A user's perceptual style may affect how he or she interacts with a product, and what he or she appreciates in the product. Therefore, designers need to be aware of their own perceptual style and of the perceptual styles of the people who use their products. In a first attempt to develop an empirical measure of perceptual style, we transformed Peck and Childers' (2003) Need For Touch scale into equivalent scales for all sensory modalities: the Need for Sensory Stimulation Scales. Each scale consists of two sub-scales, one measuring the extent to which a person enjoys receiving sensory information and spontaneously searches for that stimulation (autotelic) and the other one measuring the extent to which a person uses sensory input for making a decision about a product (instrumental). In a sample with an age and gender distribution comparable to the general population (N=96), the senses tended to cluster into two groups: vision and touch versus taste, smell, and audition. A cluster analysis suggested a distinction between four groups of individuals: people with high versus low needs for sensory information for all modalities, and people with primarily instrumental versus autotelic needs for sensory information. Mean responses of 38 design students were significantly higher than the general sample for touch, vision, and audition. They were equal for smell, and lower for instrumental taste. Furthermore, we started to develop a new instrument from scratch to measure perceptual style for a single modality: The Odor Awareness Scale. The scale consists of items that describe situations and common products that people tend to encounter in everyday situations and asks about their reactions towards these odors. A principal components analysis of the responses of 332 students revealed one factor that measured general odor awareness, one that indicated whether people noticed alarming smells, one factor was associated with body odors, and one factor assessed the role of odors in product purchase. The first approach has provided a simple questionnaire instrument that gives a quick estimate of a person's perceptual style, which can be used for illustrative purposes during design education. The second approach has yielded a new instrument that can help to predict how people respond to scented products. If a similar approach is used to develop scales for the other modalities as well, they can form a set of instruments that give a detailed insight into a person's perceptual style.