An empirical investigation of the capture of attention by urgent and non-urgent alarms

• 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.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Produktionsteknik, arbetsvetenskap och ergonomi (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Engineering Psychology

Teknisk psykologi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)