Stopping Safely: A Study of the Best Forward Collision Alerts

Overview

Forward collision warnings are designed to prevent collisions by alerting the driver. Car manufacturers use various alerts with different combinations of auditory and visual stimuli; however, an effectiveness comparison of these alerts has not been conducted in an academic setting. My objective is to determine which alert prompts the quickest reaction time under the influence of 3 different auditory distractions: silence, song, and simulated phone call. Previous studies have established that reaction time is significantly faster with multimodal alerts, which combine visual and auditory cues. My experiment compared five different alerts, some multimodal and some unimodal, under the influence of 3 auditory distractions. From the results of 75 reaction time tests, each for 96 participants, I found that my hypothesis that multimodal alerts prompt quicker reactions is supported (p < 0.001), but the hypothesis that people react faster to dissonant tones than to harmonic ones is not supported.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Behavioral & Social Sciences (Senior Division) · Entry S-03-26

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