title: Decision-making and response strategies in interaction with alarms: the impact of alarm reliability, availability of alarm validity information and workload.
abstract: Responding to alarm systems which usually commit a number of false alarms and/or misses involves decision-making under uncertainty. Four laboratory experiments including a total of 256 participants were conducted to gain comprehensive insight into humans' dealing with this uncertainty. Specifically, it was investigated how responses to alarms/non-alarms are affected by the predictive validities of these events, and to what extent response strategies depend on whether or not the validity of alarms/non-alarms can be cross-checked against other data. Among others, the results suggest that, without cross-check possibility (experiment 1), low levels of predictive validity of alarms ( ≤ 0.5) led most participants to use one of two different strategies which both involved non-responding to a significant number of alarms (cry-wolf effect). Yet, providing access to alarm validity information reduced this effect dramatically (experiment 2). This latter result emerged independent of the effort needed for cross-checkings of alarms (experiment 3), but was affected by the workload imposed by concurrent tasks (experiment 4). Theoretical and practical consequences of these results for decision-making and response selection in interaction with alarm systems, as well as the design of effective alarm systems, are discussed.
authors.affiliation: a Institute of Psychology and Ergonomics , Technische Universitaet Berlin , Berlin , Germany.
authors.forename: Dietrich
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Manzey
authors.forename: Nina
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gérard
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wiczorek
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003657:Decision Making; D004867:Equipment Design / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D035501:Uncertainty; D016526:Workload / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: alarm system; compliance; cry-wolf effect; decision-making; reliance