There's a Voice in the Sky;but Can a Picture Tell you More?

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. An experiment was run comparing tracking and response performance when information was presented pictorially and by speech. Pictorial subjects responded quicker and improved more with learning than did speech subjects. More research on the spatial advantages of pictorial displays is needed before too many speech displays are incorporated into the cockpit.