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Exploring the properties of alarm signals that makes them attention-capturing: The Role of interstimulus intervals

Alarm signals such as sirens are crucial in alerting users of impending dangers. Therefore, it is important that the siren is designed so it can capture user's attention. In a previous study (Hansson, 2017) background alarm sirens composed of changing-state sounds with an embedded temporal deviant, produced greater disruption of serial short-term memory than a signal without a temporal deviant. However, to give rise to disruption the siren needed to change from fast to slow, since a change from slow to fast was impotent in its effect on task performance. This was further addressed in Hansson (2018) where it was shown that acoustic change appeared to be a necessary prerequisite for obtaining the fast-to-slow temporal deviant effect: When steady-state sounds were used fast-to-slow and or slow-to-fast temporal deviants were equally disruptive of serial recall. However, in order to create a steady-state siren, inter-stimulus intervals were incorporated into the siren to prevent the continuous uninterrupted presentation of a single tone. Since inter-stimulus intervals were not used in Hansson (2017) it could be the presence of these that eliminated the potency of the fast-to-slow over the slow-to-fast temporal deviation effect in Hansson (2018). Therefore, the current study was undertaken to investigate whether the embedding inter-stimulus intervals within a changing-state siren would restore the potency of the fast-to-slow temporal deviation over the slow-to-fast temporal deviation in capturing attention. The additional disruption for fast-to-slow temporal deviants over slow-to-fast temporal deviants (that did not produce disruption relative to control) returned in the current study when inter-stimulus intervals were included within the siren. The results support the notion that the additional disruption produced by fast-to-slow, over slow-to-fast temporal deviants depend on the changing-state properties of the siren. Implications of this result for the design and operation of sirens within ecologically valid settings are discussed.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-27817
Date January 2018
CreatorsHansson, Tomas
PublisherHögskolan i Gävle, Miljöpsykologi
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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