Abstract
It is important to establish how to rouse a human operator's attention in a manual control system, from the viewpoint of active safety. In this paper, reaction times are investigated experimentally in aurally aided visual detection tasks. As auditory lead cue stimuli, a meaningful voice pronouncing the direction where a visual target appears and a meaningless sound (sinusoidal or triangular wave) are used. Two presentation methods for each auditory stimulus are adopted: One method presents the auditory stimulus from speakers placed both sides of an experimental display at the same time (Method I). The other method presents the auditory stimulus from the speaker at the same direction as the visual target (Method II). As a result, it was found that reaction times were shortened by the meaningful voice or by the auditory stimulus presented by Method II. On the lead time when the reaction time became the shortest, the presentation of the meaningless sound made it shorter compared with that of the meaningful voice. Furthermore, a relatively shorter reaction time area on the experimental screen was affected by the difference of the auditory stimulus. Therefore, useful results concerning the presentation method of auditory stimuli for the attention rousing were obtained.
