Aurally and Visually Guided Visual Search in a Virtual Environment

We investigated the time participants took to perform a visual search task for targets outside the visual field of view using a helmet-mounted display. We also measured the effectiveness of visual and auditory cues to target location. The auditory stimuli used to cue location were noise bursts previously recorded from the ear canals of the participants and were either presented briefly at the beginning of a trial or continually updated to compensate for head movements. The visual cue was a dynamic arrow that indicated the direction and angular distance from the instantaneous head position to the target. Both visual and auditory spatial cues reduced search time dramatically, compared with unaided search. The updating audio cue was more effective than the transient audio cue and was as effective as the visual cue in reducing search time. These data show that both spatial auditory and visual cues can markedly improve visual search performance. Potential applications for this research include highly visual environments, such as aviation, where there is risk of overloading the visual modality with information.