Adding a visual cue, such as texting, was explored by a team of researchers in Canada as a way to overcome this problem<\/strong>. Sharon Abel, defense scientist at Defence Research and Development Canada, will present her team’s findings at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal.<\/p>\n “In military operations, it’s critical that messages be monitored, encoded, responded to and relayed accurately<\/strong>, in a timely manner, to ensure situational awareness, personal safety, and mission success,” explains Abel.<\/p>\n To test the value of adding a visual cue to the mix, the researchers ran two experiments. First, they investigated the benefit of using visual cues to direct the listener’s attention to an audio channel delivering a target message<\/strong>. Inside a mock-up military land vehicle, participants were exposed to multiple messages over right and left earphones via headset, and loudspeakers. Variables included a background of quiet or vehicle noise, with and without babble noise that modeled surrounding conversations, and with and without visual cues.<\/p>\n For their second experiment, the team tested the benefits of instant messaging as a supplement to audio presentation of information by asking participants to engage in two tasks simultaneously<\/strong>. Participants listened to pairs of phrases in right and left headset earphones, while at the same time they had to decide whether or not simple math equations\u2014presented over a loudspeaker, as a text message, or both\u2014were correct.<\/p>\n “Participants had no difficulty responding to messages presented over the headset, although, there was a right ear advantage,” Abel says. “We discovered that messages presented over a loudspeaker in noise were more difficult to understand<\/strong>. But a visual cue directing attention and text messaging resulted in significant improvements in performance. Our findings suggest that the use of the visual system is a viable supplement for communication in cases of auditory overload or degraded listening.”<\/p>\n While the team’s findings are particularly relevant for military operations, they may also prove quite useful to a diverse range of civilian trades that involve processing auditory information from multiple sources\u2014such as air traffic control, office management, and group tutorials<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the American Institute of Physics press release via EurekAlert!: During command and control operations, military personnel are frequently exposed to extreme auditory overload \u2013 essentially bombarded by multiple messages… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[85,12,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13550"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13865,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13550\/revisions\/13865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"hearing\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Ear.jpg\")
During command and control operations, military personnel are frequently exposed to extreme auditory overload<\/strong> \u2013 essentially bombarded by multiple messages coming from radio networks, loudspeakers, and live voices in an environment also filled with high-level noise from weapons and vehicles.<\/p>\n