YOU might think that the feel of a surface is what tells you how rough it is.
But it turns out that things are not that simple. The sound you hear when you
scratch a surface can interfere with what your fingers are trying to tell you,
says an Oxford psychologist, who has measured the effect for the first time.
People get genuinely confused when presented with a conflict between hearing
and touch, says Donna Lloyd of the John Radcliffe Hospital. It takes them longer
to make judgements about texture, and the whole effect is generally
disconcerting.
To quantify the…
