Annoyance and Urgency of Auditory Alerts for in-Vehicle Information Systems

Abstract

The proliferation of in-vehicle information systems and the need for drivers to keep their eyes on the road suggest that auditory alerts will become increasingly common. This study examined how sound parameters affected perceived urgency and annoyance. The sound parameters investigated were overall density of a warning tone, pulse speed and type of burst used to create a warning tone. The context in which the auditory alert is presented was an additional factor. Significant effects were found for all factors. Annoyance and urgency of an alert depend on the context in which it is presented and sound parameters interact with context to affect the perceived urgency of alerts. Like urgency, annoyance displayed systematic variation as a function of warning signal parameters. These results suggest that auditory alert design should go beyond mapping perceived urgency of the alert to the urgency of messages, but should also consider a tradeoff analysis that addresses the costs of increasing annoyance. interpulse speed, the interval between pulses, to have the

Auditory alerts for in-vehicle information systems: The effects of temporal conflict and sound parameters on driver attitudes and performance

“…The sound characteristics included the sonic urgency of the collision avoidance warning (defined by varying the burst density and loudness) and of the e-mail alert (defined by varying the onset and offset rates). Sonic urgency refers to the urgency of the sound based on the sound parameters that previous research has shown to influence perceived urgency as measured by subjective ratings or reaction time to warnings (Edworthy et al 1991, Hellier et al 1993, Edworthy and Adams 1996, Marshall et al 2001. In this paper, we refer to sonic urgency as 'urgency' and perceived urgency as referred to as 'rated urgency'.…”

“…The collision warning was developed and tested for collision warning systems (Lerner 1991, Kiefer et al 1999. The e-mail alert was developed and tested as part of a previous set of experiments (Marshall et al 2001) The sound parameters that we chose to define high and low levels of urgency were those that have shown a strong effect on perceived urgency in previous research (Edworthy andAdams 1996, Marshall et al 2001).…”

“…A series of studies identified several variables that affect the perceived urgency of warnings as measured by subjective ratings (Marshall et al 2001). These studies provided participants with a driving scenario for which the tones were presented.…”

“…The e-mail alert was varied according to onset and offset of the sound, a parameter that was also found to greatly affect both urgency and annoyance (Marshall et al 2001). Onset and offset were used for e-mail alerts, rather than pulse density or loudness, so that comparisons between e-mail alerts and collision warnings would reflect the underlying construct of urgency rather than surface features of the auditory signal.…”

“…One explanation for this result is that the sounds were not sufficiently different. Previous studies investigating sound density found that this parameter dramatically affected the rated urgency of the warning (Marshall et al 2001). The sound densities investigated in those studies ranged from 0.2 to 0.8.…”