Michael Nees

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Lafayette College

Driver monitoring may become a standard safety feature to discourage distraction in vehicles with or without automated driving functions. Research to date has focused on technology for identifying driver distraction-little is known about how drivers will respond to monitoring systems. An exploratory online survey assessed the perceived risk and rea...

Driver monitoring, whether accompanying vehicle automation or not, appears poised for wide deployment in the near future. Driver monitoring is itself a form of automation (often needed in response to having automated other aspects of driving). Yet research to date on driver monitoring has yet to grapple with human-automation interaction issues with...

Interruptions from technology—such as alerts from mobile communication devices—are a pervasive aspect of modern life. Interruptions can be detrimental to performance of the ongoing, interrupted task. Designers often can choose whether interruptions are delivered as visual or auditory alerts. Contradictory theories have emerged regarding whether aud...

Interruptions from technology–such as alerts from mobile communication devices–are a pervasive aspect of modern life. Interruptions can be detrimental to performance of the ongoing, interrupted task. Designers often can choose whether interruptions are delivered as visual or auditory alerts. Contradictory theories have emerged regarding whether aud...

The expectations and demands within undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral academic positions can vary greatly when considering teaching, research, and service. Human factors academics-in-training who enjoy teaching and are passionate about developing a pipeline of human factors practitioners or educators, might want to consider academic positions i...

Driver monitoring, whether accompanying vehicle automation or not, appears poised for wide deployment in the near future. Driver monitoring is itself a form of automation (often needed in response to having automated other aspects of driving), and previous automation research has indicated that accurate mental models are critical to successful huma...

Auditory displays are commonly used in safety-critical domains and are a vital component of universal and inclusive design practices. Despite several decades of research on brief auditory alerts for representing status and processes in user interfaces, there is no clear heuristic guidance for which type(s) of auditory alerts should be preferred for...

Although automated vehicles (AVs) come with many promises such as enabling the driver-passenger to perform non-driving-related-tasks or increased safety, the public’s acceptance of AVs will have a crucial impact on whether or not AVs will be ultimately adopted. In particular, the personality trait desire for control may influence the acceptance of...

Driver monitoring may become a standard safety feature to discourage distraction in vehicles with or without automated driving functions. Research to date has focused on technology for identifying driver distraction—little is known about how drivers will respond to monitoring systems. An exploratory online survey assessed the perceived risk and rea...

Objective: A correlational study examined relationships among driving styles, 4 subfactors of desire for control, illusion of control, accident concern, self-rated likelihood of being involved in an accident, self-rated driving skill, and self-reported accidents, violations, and close calls. Methods: An online sample of participants (N = 601) co...

Research has produced conflicting evidence regarding whether performance of an on-going visual task is disrupted more by an interruption from a visual or an auditory alert. Tasks and alerts studied to date have been complex or idiosyncratic. This experiment examined how the modality of simple alerts—visual icons or auditory tones—affected performan...

Attributions of the causes of accidents to human error are problematically reductive, yet such attributions persist in media coverage. Few experiments have examined how human error attributions affect people’s perceptions. An experiment compared attributions of accidents to “human error” versus other causes (“mechanical failure,” “technical error,”...

People construct mental models—internal cognitive representations—when they interact with dynamic systems. The introduction of automation in vehicles has raised concerns about potential negative consequences of inaccurate mental models, yet characteristics of mental models remain difficult to identify. A descriptive study used semi-structured inter...

Participants (including an online sample and college undergraduates) completed a highly automated vehicle acceptance scale as well as: (1) the Multi-dimensional Driving Style Inventory (MDSI); (2) the Desirability of Control Scale; (3) an illusion of control scale; (4) an accident concern self-rating, (5) a speed questionnaire; (6) an accidents, vi...

Potential theoretical sub-dimensions of acceptance of highly automated vehicles remain unclear. A study investigated the sub-factors of a scale to measure acceptance of high levels of automation in vehicles. An online sample of participants completed an expanded, 50-item version of the Self-driving Car Acceptance Scale (SCAS; Nees, 2016). Explorato...

Attributions of the causes of accidents to human error are problematically reductive, yet such attributions persist in media coverage. Few experiments have examined how human error attributions affect people’s perceptions. An experiment compared attributions of accidents to “human error” versus other causes (“mechanical failure,” “technical error,”...

People construct mental models—internal cognitive representations—when they interact with dynamic systems. The introduction of automation in vehicles has raised concerns about potential negative consequences of inaccurate mental models, yet characteristics of mental models remain difficult to identify. A descriptive study used semi-structured inter...

Concerns have arisen that the functionality implied by some of the terms used to described automation in vehicles does not align with the actual capabilities of automated systems. An exploratory study examined perceptions of a sample of 39 words, phrases, or names used to described automation in vehicles using similarity ratings analyzed with multi...

Despite over 25 years of intensive work in the field, sonification research and practice continue to be hindered by a lack of theory. In part, sonification theory has languished, because the requirements of a theory of sonification have not been clearly articulated. As a design science, sonification deals with artifacts—artificially created sounds...

Although the level of safety required before drivers will accept self-driving cars is not clear, the criterion of being safer than a human driver has become pervasive in the discourse on vehicle automation. This criterion actually means “safer than the average human driver,” because it is necessarily defined with respect to population-level data. A...

Both subvocal articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing have been advanced as rehearsal mechanisms for verbal material (including speech sounds) in working memory, but the mechanism of rehearsal for nonverbal sounds—especially timbral attributes of sounds—remains unclear. Since timbral attributes of sounds often have been assumed to be unvo...

Although the level of safety required before drivers will accept self-driving cars is not clear, the criterion of being safer than a human driver has become pervasive in the discourse on vehicle automation. This criterion actually means "safer than the average human driver," because it is necessarily defined with respect to population-level data. A...

Both subvocal articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing have been advanced as rehearsal mechanisms for verbal material (including speech sounds) in working memory, but the mechanism of rehearsal for nonverbal sounds – especially timbral attributes of sounds – remains unclear. Since timbral attributes of sounds often have been assumed to be...

The expectations induced by the labels used to describe vehicle automation are important to understand, because research has shown that expectations can affect trust in automation even before a person uses the system for the first time. An online sample of drivers rated the perceived division of driving responsibilities implied by common terms used...

The search for the elusive “killer app” of sonification has been a recurring theme in sonification research. In this comment, I argue that the killer-app criterion of success stems from interdisciplinary tensions about how to evaluate sonifications. Using auditory graphs as an example, I argue that the auditory display community has produced succes...

The search for the elusive “killer app” of sonification has been a recurring theme in sonification research. In this comment, I argue that the killer-app criterion of success stems from interdisciplinary tensions about how to evaluate sonifications. Using auditory graphs as an example, I argue that the auditory display community has produced succes...

The expectations induced by the labels used to describe vehicle automation are important to understand, because research has shown that expectations can affect trust in automation even before a person uses the system for the first time. An online sample of drivers rated the perceived division of driving responsibilities implied by common terms used...

Vehicle automation is becoming more widespread. As automation increases, new opportunities and challenges have emerged. Given that vision is heavily taxed in driving, much research has been conducted on an auditory channel. To identify new design spaces and solutions, we have organized successive workshops and tutorial at International Conference o...

Memory for nonverbal sounds such as those used in sonifications has been recognized as a priority for cognitive-perceptual research in the field of auditory display. Yet memory processes for nonverbal sounds are not well understood, and existing theory and research have not provided a consensus on a mechanism of memory for nonverbal sounds. We repo...

Past research on the effects of articulatory suppression on working memory for nonverbal sounds has been characterized by discrepant findings, which suggests that multiple mechanisms may be involved in the rehearsal of nonverbal sounds. In two experiments we examined the potential roles of two theoretical mechanisms of verbal working memory—articul...

Researchers have shown increased interest in mechanisms of working memory for nonverbal sounds such as music and environmental sounds. These studies often have used two-stimulus comparison tasks: two sounds separated by a brief retention interval (often 3–5 s) are compared, and a “same” or “different” judgment is recorded. Researchers seem to have...

Recent research has reported negative consequences, such as increased anxiety, associated with restricting people’s access to their mobile phones. These findings have led researchers to suggest that mobile phone use may pose a legitimately addictive behavior for some people. Other research has suggested negative effects of mobile phones on academic...

Despite enthusiastic speculation about the potential benefits of self-driving cars, to date little is known about the factors that will affect drivers’ acceptance or rejection of this emerging technology. Gaining acceptance from end users will be critical to the widespread deployment of self-driving vehicles. Long-term acceptance may be harmed if i...

Objective: Auditory displays could be essential to helping drivers maintain situation awareness in autonomous vehicles, but to date, few or no studies have examined the effectiveness of different types of auditory displays for this application scenario. Background: Recent advances in the development of autonomous vehicles (i.e., self-driving car...

Although a wealth of research has examined the effects of virtual interruptions, human-initiated interruptions are common in many work settings. An experiment compared performance on a primary data-entry task during human-initiated (human) versus computer-initiated (virtual) interruptions. Participants completed blocks of trials that featured eithe...

Auditory displays have been implemented with some success in a variety of in-vehicle technologies. Most of these applications have used discrete alerts and warnings, which present complications with false alarms and annoyance. Some research has suggested that ongoing , continuous information displays may mitigate some of the problems with discrete...

An experiment examined performance with sonifications—a general term for nonspeech auditory displays—as a function of working memory encoding and the demands of three different types of interference tasks. Participants encoded the sonifications as verbal representations, visuospatial images, or auditory images. After encoding, participants engaged...

Reality television programs that explore purportedly paranormal phenomena with pseudoscientific research approaches have emerged in popular culture. These shows commonly feature electronic voice phenomena (EVP), whereby recording devices capture audio signals that are interpreted as paranormal messages. We compared perceptions for voices in EVP wit...

We describe work-in-progress prototypes of auditory displays for fuel efficiency driver interfaces (FEDIs). Although research has established that feedback from FEDIs can have a positive impact on driver behaviors associated with fuel economy, the impact of FEDIs on driver distraction has not been established. Visual displays may be problematic for...

Research has suggested that the left hemisphere of the brain may be specialized for processing auditory speech, whereas the right hemisphere may be specialized for processing nonspeech auditory stimuli. Due to contralaterality in auditory pathways, this functional specialization has been reflected in behavioral advantages for speech stimuli present...

Auditory display research for driving has mainly examined a limited range of tasks (e.g., collision warnings, cell phone tasks). In contrast, the goal of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of enhanced auditory menu cues in a simulated driving context. The advanced auditory cues of ‘spearcons’ (compressed speech cues) and ‘spindex’ (a sp...

We describe work-in-progress prototypes of auditory displays for fuel efficiency driver interfaces (FEDIs). Although research has established that feedback from FEDIs can have a positive impact on driver behaviors associated with fuel economy, the impact of FEDIs on driver distraction has not been established. Visual displays may be problematic for...

Dual-process accounts of working memory have suggested distinct encoding processes for verbal and visual information in working memory, but encoding for nonspeech sounds (e.g., tones) is not well understood. This experiment modified the sentence􏰀picture verification task to include nonspeech sounds with a complete factorial examination of all possi...

Audio assistive technology and testing accommodations have become an increasingly prevalent and potentially useful means of promoting inclusivity in education. Technologies such as text-to-speech and other forms of audio information representation have helped to make curricula more accessible to people with visual impairments and other disabilities...

An experiment examined performance on a speeded comparison verification task with accelerated speech (spearcons), visual text, and auditory tones (sonifications). ParticipantsÕ task was to encode the state (increasing or decreasing) of a stock depicted in the first (study) stimulus for comparison with the state depicted in the second (verification)...

Modern vehicle cockpits have begun to incorporate a number of information-rich techno-logies, including systems to enhance and improve driving and navigation performance and also driving-irrelevant information systems. The visually intensive nature of the driving task requires these systems to adopt primarily nonvisual means of information display,...

A mental scanning paradigm was used to examine the representation of nonspeech sounds in working memory. Participants encoded sonifications - nonspeech auditory representations of quantitative data - as either verbal lists, visuospatial images, or auditory images. The number of tones and overall frequency changes in the sonifications were also mani...

Auditory display research for driving has mainly focused on collision warning signals, and recent studies on auditory in-vehicle information presentation have examined only a limited range of tasks (e.g., cell phone operation tasks or verbal tasks such as reading digit strings). The present study used a dual task paradigm to evaluate a plausible sc...

Auditory interfaces and sonification-information display by means of nonspeech audio (Kramer et al., 1999)-have been the subject of increasing interest in recent decades (for reviews, see Kramer et al., 1999; Frysinger, 2005). With the advent of ubiquitous digital technologies, high-fidelity sound samples have become increasingly easy and inexpensi...

A cross-modal dual attention experiment was completed by 198 undergraduates in three blocks that each consisted of an orientation task and a concurrent listening task. For the orientation task, participants located regions on an LCD that were cued by speech or one of four types of symbolic auditory cues (i.e. earcons); the concurrent task required...

Interest in the use of sound as a means of information display in human-machine systems has surged in recent years. While researchers have begun to address issues surrounding good auditory display design as well as potential domains of application, little is known about the cognitive processes involved in interpreting auditory displays. In multi-ta...

Auditory graphs—displays that represent quantitative information with sound—have the potential to make data (and therefore science) more accessible for diverse user populations. No research to date, however, has systematically addressed the attributes of data that contribute to the complexity (the ease or difficulty of comprehension) of auditory gr...

The present study was designed to provide insight into the perceptual structure of everyday sounds and how that structure relates to the external acoustic signal. Two large stimulus sets of 74 sounds each were used to gather sorting data, attribute ratings, and basic acoustic measurements for analysis using multidimensional scaling solutions (MDS)....

Auditory graph design and implementation often has been subject to criticisms of arbitrary or atheoretical decision-making processes in both research and application. Despite increasing interest in auditory displays coupled with more than two decades of auditory graph research, no theoretical models of how a listener processes an auditory graph hav...

A device-driven auditory menu interface that "pushes" the menu options to the user and requires minimal user input can be beneficial to users with both limited vision and input range. Presentation rate is important for auditory menus; they need to be slow enough for comprehension and responding, but fast enough to prevent frustration. User preferen...

A study examined the role of relative intensity levels for auditory context in auditory graph design. Auditory graphs were designed with auditory context equally as loud as sonified data, context 9 dB more intense than data, or context 9 dB less intense than data. For a point estimation task, participants who experienced auditory graphs with more i...

A study examined different types of brief training for performance of a point estimation task with a sonified graph of quantitative data. For a given trial, participants estimated the price of a stock at a randomly selected hour of a 10-hour trading day as displayed by an auditory graph of the stock price. Sixty Georgia Tech undergraduate students...

Many researchers have hoped vocational rehabilitation might help people with schizophrenia not only to work but also to develop more coherent narratives of their abilities and the boundaries imposed by their condition. This study compared narrative accounts of persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (n = 16) generated using the Indiana Psychi...

This study examined whether history of childhood sexual abuse in schizophrenia is linked with severity of vocational deficits. Work performance was measured using the Work Behavior Inventory and hours of work performed in a vocational rehabilitation program and then compared for 12 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder reporti...

Although many persons with schizophrenia report significant levels of hopelessness, less is understood about the impact of hopelessness on functioning. This study examined the relationship between initial ratings of hopelessness and work functioning in the third week of a vocational rehabilitation program for 34 veterans with a diagnosis of a schiz...

While the attributions of people with schizophrenia have been hypothesized to play a role in determining social behavior, contradictory predictions can be made about exactly what type of attributions contribute to social dysfunction. One possibility is that attributing undesirable events to internal, stable, and global factors might lead to poorer...

While the attributions of people with schizophrenia have been hypothesized to play a role in determining social behavior, contradictory predictions can be made about exactly what type of attributions contribute to social dysfunction. One possibility is that attributing undesirable events to internal, stable, and global factors might lead to poorer...

Research has alternately found that obsessive and compulsive (OC) symptoms in schizophrenia are associated with graver and lesser levels of negative symptoms. One possible explanation is that there are two distinct groups of persons with OC symptoms: those with cognitive deficits and high levels of negative symptoms and those who generally function...

This study examined whether levels of emotional distress and impairments in visual memory were uniquely associated with severity of delusions in schizophrenia. Severity of delusions was assessed using select items from the positive component of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale among 44 persons with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder...

This programmatic research project builds on results from research on data sonification and from studies investigating comprehension of visual graphs. The purpose of the project is to explore the effectiveness of using sonified graphs of real data sets from disciplines to which students are exposed during academic courses. The primary question is w...

This study examined different types of brief training for a point estimation task with auditory graphs. Participants estimated the price of a stock at a specific times in a 10-hour trading day as depicted in a sonified graph of the stock price data. Forty Georgia Tech undergraduates completed a pre-test, an experimental training session, and a post...

While a growing wealth of data have offered insights into the best practices for auditory display design and application, little is known about how listeners internally represent and use the information presented in auditory displays. At the conclusion of three separate studies, participants responded to an open-ended question about the strategies...

This study was designed to test whether associations between visual icons on a computer screen and auditory icons (environmental sounds that have a direct association with an object) or earcons (synthetic sounds that have no direct association with an object) are easier to learn. In addition, localization of sound presentation relative to the posit...

Effective multimodal graphing tools can be beneficial to both sighted and visually impaired students and scientists. However, before this can become a reality, considerable research is required on the auditory graphing components. We suggest mappings, polarities, scaling, context, and training be studied in particular. We point to previous work in...

Research has suggested that representational and perceptual systems draw upon some of the same processing structures, and evidence also has accumulated to suggest that representational formats are malleable by instructions. Very little research, however, has considered how nonspeech sounds are internally represented, and the use of audio in systems...