Frictional instabilities as an alternative to friction coefficient in fine touch perception

Fine touch perception is often correlated to material properties and friction coefficients, but the inherent variability of human motion has led to low correlations and contradictory findings. Instead, we hypothesized that humans use frictional instabilities to discriminate between objects. Here, we constructed a set of coated surfaces with minimal physical differences, but due to differences in surface chemistry, generated different types of instabilities depending on how quickly a finger is slid and pressed during sliding. In one experiment, we used a mechanical mock finger to quantify and classify differences in instability formation from different coated surfaces. In a second experiment, participants perform a discrimination task using the same coated surfaces. Using the data from these two experiments, we found that human discrimination response times were faster with surfaces where the mock finger produced more stiction spikes and discrimination accuracy was higher where the mock finger produced more steady sliding. Conversely, traditional metrics like surface roughness or average friction coefficient did not relate to tactile discriminability. In fact, the typical method of averaging friction coefficients led to a spurious correlation which erroneously suggests that distinct objects should feel identical and identical objects should feel distinct—similar to findings by others. Friction instabilities may offer a more predictive and tractable framework of fine touch perception than friction coefficients, which would accelerate the design of tactile interfaces.