Our experience of materials does not merely comprise judgments of single properties such as glossiness or roughness but is rather made up of a multitude of simultaneous impressions of qualities. To understand the neural mechanisms yielding such complex impressions, we suggest that it is necessary to extend existing experimental approaches to those that view material perception as a distributed and dynamic process. A distributed representations framework not only fits better with our perceptual experience of material qualities, it is commensurate with recent psychophysics and neuroimaging results.