A surface texture is perceived through both the sound and vibrations produced while being explored by our fingers. Because of their common origin, both modalities have a strong influence on each other, particularly at above 60 Hz for which vibrotactile perception and pitch perception share common neural processes. However, whether the sensation of rhythm is shared between audio and haptic perception is still an open question. In this study, we show striking similarities between the audio and haptic perception of rhythmic changes, and demonstrate the interaction of both modalities below 60 Hz. Using a new surface-haptic device to synthesize arbitrary audio-haptic textures, psychophysical experiments demonstrate that the perception threshold curves of audio and haptic rhythmic gradients are the same. Moreover, multimodal integration occurs when audio and haptic rhythmic gradients are congruent. We propose a multimodal model of rhythm perception to explain these observations. These findings suggest that audio and haptic signals are likely to be processed by common neural mechanisms also for the perception of rhythm. They provide a framework for audio-haptic stimulus generation that is beneficial for nonverbal communication or modern human-machine interfaces.

Modulation of the frictional force of a fingertip sliding over a surface-haptic device can produce compelling sensations of texture and relief. The virtual sensation is particularly apparent and feel as fixed in space if the stimulus is rigorously correlated with the displacement of the finger. While frictional textures tactually resemble their real counterparts, some exploratory conditions under which the sharpness of the texture declines exist. We postulate that this decline in sharpness is caused by the perceptual limitation of the attempt to interpret the variation in friction as an out-of-plane sinusoidal topography. To investigate these questions, we measured the detection thresholds of sinusoidal friction-modulated gratings for a wide range of spatial periods explored at two different speeds. We compared the results with the detection thresholds, reported in the literature, of real gratings and vibrotactile stimuli. We found that the detection of spatial friction-modulated textures does not follow the same trend as that of real textures but is more similar to the vibrotactile rendering, which is strongly influenced by the exploratory speed. This article provides a better understanding of the perception of friction-modulated textures and provides insight into how to design impactful stimuli on surface-haptic devices.