Auditory Motion and Pedestrian-Motor Vehicle Collisions

描述：行人与机动车碰撞占所有职业死亡人数的6%以上。减少这些事故的知觉干预主要集中在视觉上。听觉方法受到的研究关注较少。然而，考虑到对行人和车辆操作员的视觉注意力的高要求，听觉警告可能是减少与机动车互动的行人外伤的有效途径。最近一项关于听觉逼近感知的研究表明，听众往往低估了接近的声源到达他们的时间。感知偏差有效地表明，源比实际更近，因此，给听众比预期更多的时间来避免碰撞（安全边际效应）。然而，有两个警告，这些发现是关于减少工人死亡率和创伤性伤害的重要。首先，许多关于听觉隐现的研究都是在远低于典型机动车辆的声源速度下完成的。其次，越来越多的证据表明，对于听觉隐现的感知安全边际，音调比通常由机动车发出的宽带噪声更大。本研究的目的是确定特定的声学条件，最大限度地提高感知偏差，以听到迫在眉睫的声源比实际更近，以及允许最早检测迫在眉睫的听觉运动的特定条件。这些信息可以利用听觉感知偏差，以经济有效的方式提高行人安全。例如，如果发现音调声音会增加迫在眉睫的偏见，那么通过临时人行道处理使接近的车辆产生微妙的音调应该会增加工人的安全边际。心理声学实验将检验听觉隐现的感知和自我中心听觉运动的初始检测。具体来说，将调查声源速度和频谱的特征（音调与噪声），以便在检测和感知逼近的机动车辆时为工作场所带来最大可能的“安全边际”。通过利用听觉感知中的感知偏差，这项工作的结果将为减少创伤性职业伤害和死亡的主要原因提供具体的、具有成本效益的建议。

DESCRIPTION: Pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions account for over 6% of all occupational fatalities. Perceptual interventions to reduce these accidents have focused primarily on vision. Auditory methods have received less research attention. However, given the high demands on the visual attention of both pedestrian workers and vehicle operators, auditory warning might be a fruitful avenue for the reduction of traumatic injury to pedestrian workers who interact with motor vehicles. Recent research on the perception of auditory looming has shown that listeners tend to underestimate the amount of time it will take for an approaching sound source to reach them. The perceptual bias effectively signals that the source is closer than actual and thus, gives the listener more time than expected to avoid collision (the margin of safety effect). However, there are two caveats to these findings that are important with regard to the reduction of worker fatality and traumatic injury. First, much of the research on auditory looming has been done with source velocities that are far below those typical of motor vehicles. Second, there is emerging evidence to suggest that the perceptual margin of safety for auditory looming is greater for tones than for the broadband noise that is typically emitted by motor vehicles. The objectives of this research are to identify the specific acoustic conditions that maximize the perceptual bias to hear looming sound sources as closer than actual, and the specific conditions that allow the earliest detection of looming auditory motion. This information can then be used to enhance pedestrian safety in a cost effective manner by taking advantage of auditory perceptual biases. For example, if tonal sounds are found to increase the looming bias, then making approaching vehicles produce subtle tones with a temporary a pavement treatment should increase the margin of worker safety. Psychoacoustic experiments will be carried out that examine the perception of auditory looming and the initial detection of egocentric auditory motion. Specifically, the characteristics of source velocity and spectrum (tones vs. noise) will be investigated in order to bring to the workplace the largest possible "margin of safety" in detecting and perceiving looming motor vehicles. By capitalizing on perceptual biases in auditory perception, the results of this work will provide specific, cost effective recommendations for reducing a leading cause of traumatic occupational injury and death.