On the Other Hand

NEWSLETTER ARTICLE

Signal detection theory holds that the greatest benefit from alarms comes from any alarm, and that increasing levels of specificity have increasingly fewer benefits. Researchers at MIT investigated the use of a single master alarms versus more specific individual alarms (Cummings, M., Kilgore, R., Wang, E., Tijerina, L., and Kochhar, D. "Effects of single Versus Multiple Warnings on Driver Performance" Vol 49, No 6, 2007, pp-1097-1106). Not surprisingly, there was no measurable performance difference between the "relatively uninformative" master alarm and the "information-rich auditory icons".

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