An evaluation of icon, tone and speech cues for detecting anomalies and auditory communications for onboard military vehicle displays

Abstract

Mission demands and environments have forced soldiers to operate within the safety of their own vehicles. Technological inserts would have to be incorporated so that situation awareness of solders is not compromised. As a result, soldiers have to process large amount of information displayed on multiple screens and operate hardware devices simultaneously. Since visual displays will be the main source of information, there might be information overload due to this large onslaught of visual information. It is postulated that auditory displays can supplement the visual displays by providing information or for alert cueing. Audio cues can take the form of speech and non-speech (tones, icons). Hence, an experiment was designed to determine which type of auditory cues will help in the detection of anomalies and attention to auditory communications for users operating in a visually and aurally flooded environment. From the experiments, auditory icons were found to be superior.