An auditory display in a dual-axis tracking task.

Results of a study in which subjects were presented concurrently with the primary task of controlling a second-order plant and the secondary task of controlling a first-order plant. The plant errors for the two tasks were shown on separate visual displays. An auditory display, whose output varied in frequency and volume with the error, was used to supplement the secondary task in half of the runs. To study the effects of the auditory display, two performance measures were obtained: (1) the integral of the squared error (ISE) and (2) the describing functions of the human operator. Statistical analysis of the ISE measures indicated that when the secondary task was supplemented with an auditory display, there was a significant improvement in performance on the secondary task. The performance on the primary task improved on the average, but not significantly. The variances of the ISE values decreased for both the tasks, indicating a more consistent behavior with the auditory display. The describing function analysis showed that supplementing the secondary task with the auditory display increased the low frequency gain of the human operator for this task. The describing functions for the primary task did not show any apparent changes.