How Long Does it Take to Identify Everyday Sounds?

Previous studies of alarm design have concluded that the faster a mental representation of the cause of the alarm is activated, the quicker the adapted reaction. In order to select sounds that are quick to identify, an experiment was carried out using a gated stimulus paradigm with 117 everyday sounds. Almost half of the sounds were identified in less than 150 ms, including bothclassical alarms and sounds from other categories of everyday sounds. Thus it should possible to identify acoustic properties of each category of alarms within an integrated alarm system in order to improve discrimination among them.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICAD
• Authors: Anne Guillaume, Lionel Pellieux, Véronique Chastres, Claude Blancard, Carolyn Drake
• Keywords: Alarm, Alarm Design, Emerging Technology, Everyday Sounds, ICAD 2004