Informative Sound Assists Timing in a Simple Visual Decision-Making Task

In this study, we examined the design of informative sound to assist timing in a simple, multimodal, game task. The game was initially designed as a series of eight second, visual decision-making tasks. Players could respond quickly, with more risk, or wait longer for more information thus reducing their risk of being incorrect. The player was scored by counting the number of correct attempts they completed in a five-minute interval. Waiting longer made the task easier, but overall, reduced the number of opportunities they had to repeat the task. In general terms, this game was designed to examine the way a player balances risk and reward. Unfortunately, the visual version of the game introduced the unintentional risk of a 'safe' player waiting too long, timing out and failing to respond at all. This unbalanced the risk-reward structure of the game. This study reports on the subsequent design and evaluation of a simple informative sound that was added to the game. The intention was to address this time-out issue without impacting on other aspects of player performance. A within-subject experiment with 48 participants measured the response time, success rate and number of timeouts of the players in a sequence of tasks. We measured player performance in three conditions, no sound (visual-only), constant (non-informative) sound and increasing amplitude (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. Importantly, this reduction in timeouts did not impair the players' performance in terms of their success rate or response time.