The Relationship between Task Performance, Reaction Time, and Perceived Urgency in Nonverbal Auditory Warnings

<jats:p> Two experiments are described in which participants were required to respond to auditory warnings known to vary in their perceived urgency. In the first, they simply responded to a warning of high, medium or low urgency whilst performing a simultaneous tracking task. Responses to the high urgency warning were faster than to the others. In the second experiment participants carried out an addition task on hearing the warning, and the warnings were either matched or mismatched to the difficulty of the task. Results show that responses to the most urgent warnings were again faster, and also that the degree of mismatching between warning and task degraded performance in some conditions. </jats:p>