This paper attempts to provide an account of the nature and levels of processing involved when information from one source is integrated with a supposedly redundant additional source to provide a performance gain in choice reaction time (RT) tasks. Consideration is given to the comprehension benefits arising from this 'Redundancy Gain' effect and to assess these within both a theoretical framework and the applied context of aircrew systems design. Three experiments are described which were intended to investigate this redundancy gain effect. The first used bi-modal (visual/verbal) presentation of simple printed digits/spoken numbers to establish the presence of cross-modal integrality. The second experiment used colours, words and combinations of both with shared semantic associations to determine whether or not redundancy gain occurs at the 'level of comprehension'. The third experiment used warning 'icons' (pictorial representations of danger situations) and verbal warning messages. The high level of abstraction of these icons strongly implied that the performance gains occurring must be as the result of the integration of 'information' rather than 'data'. The results of these experiments are considered in terms of current information Processing and Neural Network theories and an attempt to provide a cognitive model of this integrality effect is also described.
Cite as: Taylor, R.M., Selcon, S.J. (1991) Multiple information sources; a cognitive integrality model. Proc. 2nd VENACO Workshop - The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue, 159-160
@inproceedings{taylor91b_smmd,
author={R. M. Taylor and S. J. Selcon},
title={{Multiple information sources; a cognitive integrality model}},
year=1991,
booktitle={Proc. 2nd VENACO Workshop - The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue},
pages={159--160}
}