Presentation
Memory for Emergency Information in Vehicles: Investigation of Modality and Repetition
DescriptionWireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) are life-saving alerts sent across the U.S. to cellular devices to inform recipients of dangers in their area. Today, WEAs do not broadcast on in-vehicle information systems which creates opportunities for drivers to miss crucial information or act unsafely by handling their phone while driving. Due to the unpredictability of emergencies, WEAs can broadcast at any time and disrupt any task. However, the public does not always have the attentional resources to allocate when a WEA is disseminated, leaving the question of how the public could encode and retrieve alert information under conditions of distraction. Past research indicated that multimodal presentation of information leads to stronger memory traces in encoding, even under distraction. This study investigated how multimodal and auditory only delivery of WEA information, and how repetition of these alerts, affects memory for the information and concurrent driving performance. The results show that repeated exposure to WEA information improved memory, but only for multimodal delivery, not auditory delivery. Message modality was also found to not affect driver performance such as lane variability and velocity. Study results suggest that there may be benefits to using multimodal presentations and a limited number of repetitions in WEA dissemination.
Event Type
Lecture
TimeTuesday, October 20th2:10pm - 2:30pm PDT
Location
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