A proposal of the event-related potential method to effectively identify kansei words for assessing product design features in kansei engineering research

The effective acquisition of kansei words for assessing product design features plays a decisive role in knasei engineering research, whereas previous studies rarely give a full understanding of how to effectively grasp the related kansei words. The existing findings revealed that traditional methods based on questionnaire surveys might have trouble and limitations in kansei words acquisition. The process requires the active involvement of users, which could be time-consuming, expensive, knowledge and labor intensive. Hence, there still remains a need for an efficient method that can effectively identify kansei words for assessing product design features in kansei engineering study. The N400, an event-related potential (ERP), can be triggered by semantic violations in visual stimulus materials. The present study investigates whether N400 can be used as an electrophysiological measurement to effectively identify kansei words for assessing product design features in kansei engineering research. This study takes the SUVs’ pictures as the prime stimulus and two relatedness-match levels of kansei words from a high level to a low level as the target stimulus, including the unrelated kansei words and related kansei words. It is shown that the related kansei words elicit a shorter N400 amplitude than the unrelated kansei words. Moreover, the N400 exhibits the different scalp distributions between related and unrelated kansei words. These findings indicate that the N400 could be used to compensate limitations of conventional questionnaire surveys in kansei words acquisition for assessing product design features. With the assistance of N400 neural measurement in kansei words acquisition, kansei engineering will advance further as a modernized technology in kansei product design. The method proposed in this study uses N400 to effectively identify kansei words, which can be applied to kansei engineering research and improve the product development process. •An event-related potential method was proposed to effectively identify kansei words in kansei engineering research.•The N400 can be utilized to make clear whether some kansei words are related or unrelated to product design features.•The related kansei words elicit a shorter N400 amplitude than the unrelated kansei words.•The N400 exhibits the different scalp distributions between the related and unrelated kansei words.