Does the Perceived Urgency of Auditory Signals Affect Auditory Spatial Cueing in Visual Search Tasks?

Abstract

In the auditory warning literature, investigators have identified acoustic parameters such as harmonicity and interpulse interval that affect perceived urgency of a warning sound. In the present investigation, we asked whether these parameters would affect visual orienting in a visual search task. Participants located and identified visual targets in a large cluttered search field. Audio cues to the target were also presented. In baseline conditions, auditory cues varying in perceived urgency were presented alone, and the time required to identify the visual target was measured. In the paired-cue conditions, two audio cues were presented, one valid and one invalid. Cue informativeness and cue urgency were manipulated. Performance interference was measured as the difference in search latencies between the informative cue and the corresponding cue in the baseline condition. Although baseline search latencies were not affected by perceived urgency in the baseline conditions, perceived urgency did affect the amount of interference produced by uninformative cues in the paired-cued conditions