Beyond Symbols: Motion Perception Cues Enhance Dual-Task Performance with Wearable Directional Guidance

2025-10-07

International Workshop on the Semantic Web

AI Summary

This study addresses the cognitive interference caused by traditional symbolic directional cues, which require semantic parsing and divert attention from primary tasks. To mitigate this issue, the authors propose a motion-based peripheral visual stimulus delivered monocularly through wearable displays, leveraging humans’ innate sensitivity to motion for low-intrusion directional guidance. By capitalizing on perceptual psychology and human factors principles, this approach eliminates the need for gaze shifts and symbolic interpretation. In a high-workload dual-task experiment, the method significantly improved directional judgment accuracy (p = .008) and showed a trend toward reducing errors in the primary task (p = .066), demonstrating its potential as an efficient, non-intrusive solution for directional cueing in demanding operational environments.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Symbolic Representations
• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Directional cues are crucial for environmental interaction. Conventional methods rely on symbolic visual or auditory reminders that require semantic interpretation, a process that proves challenging in demanding dual-tasking scenarios. We introduce a novel alternative for conveying directional cues on wearable displays: directly triggering motion perception using monocularly presented peripheral stimuli. This approach is designed for low visual interference, with the goal of reducing the need for gaze-switching and the complex cognitive processing associated with symbols. User studies demonstrate our method's potential to robustly convey directional cues. Compared to a conventional arrow-based technique in a demanding dual-task scenario, our motion-based approach resulted in significantly more accurate interpretation of these directional cues (p=.008) and showed a trend towards reduced errors on the concurrent primary task (p=.066).

Problem

• directional cues
• dual-task performance
• symbolic guidance
• motion perception
• wearable displays

Innovation

• motion perception
• wearable directional guidance
• peripheral stimulation
• dual-task performance
• non-symbolic cues