A PSYCHOPHYSICAL STUDY ON WEIGHT SENSITIVITY BY THE FOOT AND HAND

The weight of shoes may serve as a determining factor of perceived comfort and feel to the consumer in their purchase and repurchase decisions of footwear. People, however, seem to have trouble in accurately judging the feeling of weight of shoes on their feet. This paper made a psychophysical study of subjects′ sensitivity to weight on their feet and in their hands. The experiment consisted of 3 tests according to the motions people make when they evaluate the feel of shoes: 1) vertical lifting of a shoe on the foot ("hefting" in on the foot) 2) swing the shod foot back and forth; 3) holding and lifting a shoe by hand ("hefting" it in the hand). The method of constant stimuli and magnitude estimation were used for the experiment with 20 subjects. Weber′s ratios and the power law exponents obtained for each of the three tests were 0.156 and 0.713, 0.108 and 0.970, and 0.065 and 1.249, respectively in the same order of the previously listed tests.