Auditory icons involve a relation between a signal and referent (e.g., a cough to signal dangerous levels of carbon monoxide), whereas an abstract sound such as a beep involves only arbitrary mapping between a signal and the event to which it refers. This paper reports on an experiment to investigate the efficacy of auditory icons as warning signals in aviation. The 172 participants completed a computer-based training session and test task that involved responding to abstract or iconic auditory (1 s), visual, or auditory + visual warnings associated with seven critical incidents while performing low- and high-demand concurrent tasks. Results showed that significantly fewer training trials were required to learn iconic warnings than abstract warnings. An advantage for iconic warnings persisted into the test phase, evident most consistently as greater warning recognition accuracy. The effect was observed in both high- and low-demand conditions. Auditory abstract warnings, in particular, elicited slow reaction times and poor accuracy. These findings suggest that, although training is required and response times are relatively slow, associations between meaningful environmental sounds and critical incidents can be more easily learned than abstract associations.
Samenvatting