Performance of a Sonification Task in the Presence of Verbal, Visuospatial, and Auditory Interference Tasks

Abstract

An experiment examined performance with sonifications-a general term for nonspeech auditory displays-as a function of working memory encoding and the demands of three different types of interference tasks. Participants encoded the sonifications as verbal representations, visuospatial images, or auditory images. After encoding, participants engaged in brief verbal, visuospatial, or auditory interference tasks before responding to point estimation queries about the sonifications. Results were expected to show selective impact on sonification task performance when the interference task demands matched the working memory encoding strategy, but instead a pattern of general working memory interference emerged in addition to auditory modal interference. In practical applications, results suggested that performance with auditory displays will be impacted by any interference task, though auditory tasks likely will cause more interference than verbal or visuospatial tasks.

Sonification of Animal Tracks as an Alternative Representation of Multi-Dimensional Data: A Northern Elephant Seal Example

“…Dubus and Bresin, 2013), first as a tool to assist visually-impaired analysts to explore data (e.g., Zhao et al, 2008), as well as an option when visual attention must be devoted to other tasks (e.g., Nees and Walker, 2014;Compare, 2017). The emergence of data sonification as an analytical approach is particularly well-suited for time-related tasks, such as monitoring, synchronization or understanding motion of multiple objects (Dubus and Bresin, 2013).…”