| 1. |
- Körning-Ljungberg, Jessica, et al.
(författare)
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An empirical investigation of the capture of attention by urgent and non-urgent alarms
- 2009
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Studies aiming to establish what constitutes an efficient auditory alarm have used subjective ratings to measure perceived urgency. Such studies have suggested that words spoken urgently are rated as more urgent than words spoken non-urgently. The present study aimed to measure objectively the potency of alarms to capture attention away from a focal task using a cross-modal oddball paradigm. Participants judged the parity of visual digits while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials, a sine wave tone (standard) preceded each digit. On rare trials, the standard was replaced by a spoken word (novel). All novels distracted participants from the visual task, with urgent alarms yielding faster response latencies than non-urgent alarms. Subjective ratings confirmed that participants rated urgently spoken words as more urgent. Future work should examine whether our findings reflect perceptual differences between urgent and non-urgent novels, or the speeding up of visual targets by urgent novels.
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| 2. |
- Körning-Ljungberg, Jessica, et al.
(författare)
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Attention captured - what constitutes a good alarm?
- 2009
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Most high risk occupations involve a stressful environment and auditory alarms designed to capture operator's attention and alert them about potential incidents. Most studies on auditory alarms have been conducted using subjective measurements to explore, for example, perceived urgency, highlighting factor such as the spoken intonation as important. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of intonation and valence on behavioral performance in using a cross-modal oddball measuring the involuntary capture of attention by sound. Participants judged if visually presented digits were odd or even while exposed to task-irrelevant sounds. In 80% of the trials, a sine wave tone (standard) preceded each digit, while on 20% of the trials the standard was replaced by a spoken word (novel). Novels varied in semantic valence (negative versus neutral) and intonation (urgent versus calm). Subjective ratings of perceived "urgency" and "attention grabbingness" were subsequently collected for these words from the same participants. The results revealed that, compared to the standard condition, all novels increased accuracy slightly and equally. Response latencies proved more sensitive, however, yielding a reduced distraction effect for urgent than non-urgent words, while the words' valence had no impact. The results from the subjective ratings on the other hand showed that both the words urgency and content increased significantly perceived "urgency" and "attention grabbingness". In conclusion, some of our findings fit well with alarm studies on alarms using subjective ratings and their assumption that subjective ratings are valuable for the design of better alarms. However, our results also highlight the lack of correspondence between subjective and objective measures of attention capture with respect to the words' content.
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| 3. |
- Parmentier, Fabrice, et al.
(författare)
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The involuntary capture of attention by novel sounds : is it really about novelty?
- 2009
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Ingår i: APCAM 2009.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Unexpected events often distract us. In the laboratory, novel auditory stimuli have been shown to capture attention away from a focal visual task and yield specific electrophysiological responses as well as a behavioral cost to performance. This phenomenon is thought to follow ineluctably from the sound's low probability of occurrence or, put more simply, its unexpected occurrence. Our study challenges this view and argues that past research failed to identify the informational value of sound as a mediator of novelty distraction. We report an experiment showing that (1) novelty distraction is only observed when the sound announces the occurrence and timing of an upcoming visual target (as is the case in all past research); (2) that no such distraction is observed for deviant sounds conveying no such information; and that (3) deviant sounds can actually facilitate performance when these, but not the standards, convey information. We conclude that novelty distraction is observed in the presence of novel sounds but only when the cognitive system can take advantage of the auditory distracters to optimize performance.
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