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Abstract

A current trend in cockpit design is to incorporate synthesized speech to present secondary information. Multiple-resource theories of information processing support this, but theories of stimulus/central-processing/response compatibility suggest that spatial information presented visually may have some advantages over speech if the response is manual. Two experiments compare response performance over single and dual tasks when information was presented pictorially and by speech. Pictorial subjects responded more quickly than did speech subjects. The addition of the visual tracking task in the dual-task condition had a differential effect on performance, depending on the modality of the primary task and the rate at which information was presented. The dual task impeded performance more in the fast and medium presentation rates for the speech condition but had little differential effect across rates for the pictorial condition. Analysis of the error data indicated that subjects in the pictorial condition were better able to maintain the context of the emergency than those in the speech condition. Results are discussed in terms of current theories of information processing.

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Comparison of Speech and Pictorial Displays in a Cockpit Environment

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