Touch and sound reaction: A new analysis of how people react to sights, sounds, and touch suggests the body’s autonomic nervous system fires most strongly to haptic (touch) stimuli, even though people say they feel most aroused by audio, especially music.
The work, led by researchers at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering and published in PLOS Mental Health, highlights a split between physiology and perception that could inform mental-health care and emotionally aware technologies.
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The team re-examined a public dataset that continuously recorded skin conductance, a readout of autonomic activity driven by tiny changes in sweating. At the same time, participants viewed images, heard sounds or music, and received touch stimuli. Using signal-processing models to separate fast and slow components of the electrical response, the researchers mapped moment-by-moment “cognitive arousal” without relying solely on self-report.
They found the nervous system peaked within about two seconds of any new stimulus, with touch producing the largest immediate activations. Yet when participants rated their own arousal, audio, particularly sounds and music, most often topped the list. In other words, what the body reacts to fastest isn’t always what the mind labels as most stimulating.
The authors say this physiology-perception gap offers a framework for estimating and tuning arousal in real time, potentially aiding diagnosis and treatment monitoring for mental-health conditions and guiding the design of interfaces that respond to users’ emotional states.
