Why Do Auditory Warnings During Steering Allow for Faster Visual Target Recognition?

Auditory cues are often used to capture and direct attention, away from an ongoing task to a critical situation. In the context of driving, previous research have shown that looming sounds, which convey time-to-contact information through their rising-intensity profiles, promote faster braking times to potential front collisions. The current experiment investigates the role of auditory warnings in facilitating the identification of visual objects in the visual periphery during steering. This approximates the use of auditory warnings for cueing possible candidates for side collisions. We expected faster response times for visual targets cued by a looming sound compared to a constant sound. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded to determine whether faster response times were due to either earlier or stronger neural responses to the visual target. We hypothesize: (1) earlier event-related potentials (ERPs) for cued compared to non-cued visual targets, and (2) larger amplitudes for visual targets that were cued by looming versus constant sounds