Pitch and loudness interactions between audition and touch.

Sensory signals combine and interact to produce stable representations of our environment. Audition and touch both convey information about environmental oscillations. We hypothesized that the two modalities interact in the perception of sounds and vibrations. We conducted a series of psychophysical experiments to explore how auditory and tactile signals interact in frequency and intensity perception. We found that audio‐tactile pitch interactions are bidirectional, as distractors influence frequency perception regardless of the attended modality. In contrast, we found that loudness interactions depend on the attended modality: Tactile distractors influence judgments of auditory loudness, but judgments of tactile intensity are impervious to auditory distractions. We also found that audio‐tactile pitch and loudness interactions differ in their sensitivity to stimulus timing. These results reveal that auditory and tactile inputs combine differently depending on the perceptual task. That distinct rules gover...