Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London
This is a slightly edited version of the experiment we ran for our forthcoming article (Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012). In the last few days it’s been reported on by various media outlets, including the BBC, the Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Please put on some headphones and try it for yourself.
As always, we’d love to hear your comments!
Our article about people’s failure to notice an auditory ‘gorilla man’ when paying attention to something else will shortly be published in Cognition. You can listen to a demo here. Remember to use headphones for the full 3D effect! More details coming soon.
Our recent article investigated the impact of satnavs on driver performance.
We found that the spoken directions are widely used by drivers and are remembered more effectively than map-based directions. In addition, participants in our study were able to follow simple spoken instructions without any adverse impact on the simulated driving task. These findings indicate that auditory presentation can be a very effective way of delivering route guidance to drivers.
However, when the spoken instructions became more complex, we did see reductions in driving performance. It is therefore important to keep the spoken directions as simple and straightforward as possible.
This research has been covered by a range of media outlets including the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph. As ever, we would welcome your feedback, so please do contact us if you have questions or comments.
Our paper investigating the impact of satnavs on driving has just been published online here. We are very excited about the amount of interest it has generated! More details coming soon.