Sensitivity to haptic-audio asynchrony

Abstract

The natural role of sound in actions involving mechanical impact and vibration suggests the use of auditory display as an augmentation to virtual haptic interfaces. In order to budget available computational resources for sound simulation, the perceptually tolerable asynchrony between paired haptic-auditory sensations must be known. This paper describes a psychophysical study of detectable time delay between a voluntary hammer tap and its auditory consequence (a percussive sound of either 1, 50, or 200 ms duration). The results show Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs) for temporal asynchrony of 24 ms with insignificant response bias. The invariance of JND and response bias as a function of sound duration in this experiment indicates that observers cued on the initial attack of the auditory stimuli.