Crossmodal Links in Attention in the Driving Environment: The Roles of Cueing Modality, Signal Timing, and Workload

Abstract

Multimodal information presentation has been proposed as a means to support timesharing in complex data-rich environments. To ensure the effectiveness of this approach, it is necessary to consider performance effects of recently discovered crossmodal spatial and temporal links in attention, as well as their interaction with other performance-shaping factors. The main goals of this research were to confirm that performance effects of crossmodal links in spatial attention scale to complex environments and to examine how these effects vary as a function of cue modality, signal timing, and workload. In the present study, set in a driving simulation, spatially valid and invalid auditory and tactile cues preceded the presentation of visual targets at various stimulus-onset asynchronies and under different levels of workload induced by simulated wind gusts of varied intensity. The findings from this experiment confirm that visual target identification accuracies and response times are, overall, more accurate and faster when validlycued. Significant interactions were found between cue validity, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and cue modality, such that valid tactile cueing is most beneficial at shorter (100 -200 ms) SOAs, while valid auditory cueing resulted in faster responses than invalid cueing at 500 ms SOAs, but slower responses at 1000 ms SOAs. Tactile error rates were significantly higher than auditory error rates at various interactions of modality and SOA. These findings were robust across all workload conditions. They highlight the need for context-sensitive information presentation and can inform the design of multimodal interfaces for a wide range of application domains.

Effects of Oncoming Vehicle Size on Overtaking Judgments

“…Traffic scenes were created with a STISIM Drive TM simulator housed in a 2.40 GHz computer. STISIM Drive TM is a medium-fidelity driving software package (Tilak et al, 2008;Tippey et al, 2014), and is widely used to evaluate driving performance (Freund et al, 2002;2005;Lee et al, 2003;Shechtman, 2010). Data collected with STISIM Drive TM have been shown…”

Eye-tracking and Virtual Reality in 360-degrees: exploring two ways to assess attentional orienting in rear space

“…Additionally, the magnitude of these differences may vary depending on target location (front/rear) and modality (visual/auditory). We assume that visual cue will be the most effective in frontal space [Chica et al 2007;Schmitt et al 2000], followed closely by auditory cues [Driver and Spence 1998;Tilak et al 2008]. Auditory may be more effective than the intra-modal visual condition for the rear space [Ho and Spence 2005;Lee and Spence 2015].…”

Attentional orienting in real and virtual 360-degree environments

“…Only studies using an auditory cue and a visual target were conducted at 360 • [ Lee and Spence 2015]. We assume that using a visual cue and a visual target will be the most effective in frontal space [Chica et al 2007;Schmitt et al 2000], followed closely by using an auditory cue and a visual target [Driver and Spence 1998b;Tilak et al 2008]. Auditory cue and visual target may be more effective than the intramodal visual condition for the rear space [Ho and Spence 2005;Lee and Spence 2015].…”