Designing Sonification for Effective Attentional Control in Complex Work Domains

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Abstract
Complex safety-critical work domains such as anesthesia require human operators to direct their attention appropriately. A sonification is a possible method for directing attention to relevant changes while still allowing monitoring under divided attention conditions. However, there is currently little information to guide the design of sonification. Two experiments investigated the effect of the number of auditory streams on ability to detect changes (Experiment 1), and the effect of the number of auditory streams under different attention conditions (Experiment 2). When monitoring with selective attention, participants noted changes more accurately with three streams than with one or two streams, but when there were also distracter changes participants noted changes more accurately in multiple streams. Overall, accuracy was lower when attention was divided than when it was selective, but accuracy was especially low in the three-stream configuration. Distracter changes increased divided attention accuracy. The results suggest that the number of streams should be minimized if operators' attention will be divided between monitoring and other tasks.

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