An older 2005 paper where the main idea is to provide some form of 'feedback' in robotic surgery systems so that a surgeon can understand the forces he/she would feel in practice. I think with teleoperation, you don't experience the same forces as if you were directly touching the tools. Update: well, maybe you do, but with the da vinci, you don't get force feedback.
They perform some visual feedback and audio feedback, and find that visual is better than audio, and the combination is also good. But, it should have been obvious from the way they set things up! The audio cue only gives a sound once or very infrequently whereas the visual feedback involves color-changing bars to the upper right area of the teleoperation view.
The focus is on providing feedback ("haptic feedback" more accurately) of the forces involved, for the task of surgical suturing.