PSYCHOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS ABSTRACT

Daniel Reed

MA-Research
December 2003

An Examination of Aurally Aided Visual Search Performance Using Urgency Characteristics of Auditory Warning Sounds

    The current study explored the relationship between perceived urgency characteristics of warning sounds and their influence on overt orienting using an aurally aided visual search paradigm.  Participants were presented with informative-uninformative spatial cue-pairs across distances from a point of fixation and levels of perceived urgency.  Performance interference, or the effect of urgency mapping, was measured as the difference in search times between the cue-pairs and informative cue baseline conditions.  Findings indicated that more urgent cues produced greater differences in performance interference when uninformative and at the periphery, and less interference when informative; suggesting that levels of perceived urgency alone, as implied by the literature’s subjective approach, may not be sufficient in predicting observer behavior.  Because perceiving and recognizing a sound as urgent is a different process from using a warning sound as a strategy to performing a task, a recommendation is made to implement aurally aided visual search paradigms into future urgency research tasks.

Psychology Department * CSULB * 1250 Bellflower Blvd. * Long Beach, CA  90840-0901 * 562-985-5001