Affective multimodal displays: Acoustic spectra modulates perception of auditory-tactile signals

Paper i proceeding, 2008

Emotional events may interrupt ongoing cognitive processes and automatically grab attention, modulating the subsequent perceptual processes. Hence, emotional eliciting stimuli might effectively be used in warning applications, where a fast and accurate response from users is required. In addition, conveying information through an optimum multisensory combination can lead to a further enhancement of user responses. In the present study we investigated the emotional response to sounds differing in their acoustic spectra, and their influence on speeded detection of auditory-somatosensory stimuli. Higher sound frequencies resulted in an increase in emotional arousal. We suggest that emotional processes might be responsible for the different auditory-somatosensory integration patterns observed for low and high frequency sounds. The presented results might have important implications for the design of auditory and multisensory warning interfaces.