Employing spatial sonification of target motion in tracking exercises

This paper presents the results of an experiment in which the effect of spatial sonification of a moving target on the user's performance during the execution of basic tracking exercises was investigated. Our starting hypothesis is that a properly designed multimodal continuous feedback could be used to represent temporal and spatial information that can in turn improve performance and motor learning of simple target following tasks. Sixteen subjects were asked to track the horizontal movement of a circular visual target by controlling an input device with their hand. Two different continuous task-related auditory feedback modalities were considered, both simulating the sound of a rolling ball, the only difference between them being the presence or absence of binaural spatialization of the target's position. Results demonstrate how spatial auditory feedback significantly decreases the average tracking error with respect to visual feedback alone, contrarily to monophonic feedback. It was thus found how spatial information provided through sound in addition to visual feedback helps subjects improving their performance.