Multimodal Interrupt: Distributing Stimulation for Gentle but Clear Notification

In this paper, we present an experiment investigating in the proper way to interrupt a continuous low priority task for an intermittent high priority task. The interrupt notification must be designed to be perceptually clear yet minimize any negative effects to carrying out the overall tasks, such as simple annoyance, disruption in the contextual flow of the on-going tasks, and even memory degradation. Our proposal is to spread the amounts of stimulation of the alarm/notification to different modalities and achieve the two potentially conflicting design goals. A psychophysical experiment was conducted to observe the level of disturbance and event recognition performance according to different amounts of distributed multimodal stimulation. The experimental results have shown that the disturbances could be reduced while maintaining a sufficient level of interrupt recognition by distributing the stimulation for notification among different modalities.