Abstract
Current guidelines and recommendations for auditory displays suggest that human auditory discrimination performance is limited and that auditory displays should be used only for alarm and alerting signals. Auditory warnings are likely to be confused even when their spectra are very different. Reducing confusion between warnings should increase the number of auditory signals which can be presented. The present research investigated the ability of human listeners to discriminate sounds varying in temporal patterning in several sound categories.
Although overall accuracy was 92 percent across the 45 dissimilar sound sequences, 7 sequences were found to be easily confused and accounted for 64 percent of the total errors made by listeners, regardless of sound category. According to subject reports, multiple simultaneously presented temporally patterned sounds within each sound category were not perceived as multiple sources but rather were fused into a single complex temporal pattern. Implications for developing complex audio displays by increasing the number and complexity of sounds and planned continuing research are also discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.