Designing informative sound to enhance a simple decision task

In this paper we examined the role of informative sound in a simple decision-making game task. A within-subject experiment with 48 participants measured the response time, success rate and number of timeouts of the players in a number of eight-second decision tasks. As time proceeds, the task becomes easier at the risk of players timing out and reducing the overall opportunities they will have to attempt the task. We designed a simple informative sound display that uses a tone that increases in amplitude over the duration of the task. We test player performance in three conditions, no sound (visual-only), constant (non-informative) sound and increasing (informative) sound. We found that the increasing sound display significantly reduced timeouts when compared with the visual only and constant sound versions of the task. This reduction in timeouts did not impair the players' performance in terms of their success rate nor response time.