From pseudo-haptic weight to product meaning: an integrative review of mediated perception, semantic activation, and judgment

Digital and immersive media increasingly allow people to inspect and manipulate products without receiving the forces that normally accompany physical handling. This creates a psychological problem: how does a digitally generated cue become a felt weight and then an abstract judgment? This integrative review synthesizes a bounded corpus of 56 publications across sensory and consumer psychology, haptic perception, embodied cognition, learned expectancy, semantic activation, and virtual-reality pseudo-haptics. A structured evidence audit separates cue generation, perceived weight, product-specific semantic activation, diagnostic inference, and downstream judgment, while distinguishing direct or near-direct quality evidence from value, preference, comfort, portability, stability, and other outcomes. Within this corpus, direct or near-direct weight-quality evidence is limited to a small subset, so favorable heavy or light effects should not be relabeled automatically as quality effects. The evidence does not support a general heavier-is-better rule. Heaviness can imply solidity, durability, quantity, or premiumness, whereas lightness can imply comfort, portability, user-friendliness, or, in some categories, advanced engineering. Embodied cognition explains why bodily weight experiences can transfer to abstract judgment but is not sufficiently specific to explain category-dependent reversals. Learned expectancy helps explain how prior knowledge can bias perceived heaviness, semantic activation explains how the same percept can make different concepts accessible across product categories, and haptic diagnosticity specifies when weight information is likely to be used. Integrating these accounts, the review uses product-specific weight semantics as an organizing construct for learned category knowledge linking heaviness or lightness to diagnostic attributes; a product-specific weight-quality schema is the narrower case in which those meanings inform perceived quality. Pseudo-haptic methods are theoretically useful because they can vary perceived weight while physical mass is held constant, allowing tests of sensation-to-meaning translation in mediated environments. The review develops a process model and research program that separates manipulation validity, perceived weight, semantic activation, diagnostic attribute inference, and causal effects on judgment.