The Modern Dilemma: Pedestrians and Personal Music Players

Abstract

Pedestrian safety has been a focus of interest in human factors research in the aim to combat the rates of pedestrian casualties caused by road and train related accidents. There is a general speculation that personal music player (PMP) use is associated with depressed levels of pedestrian awareness and attention, however this has not been validated. Objective: To determine whether the use of personal music players have a negative effect on pedestrian auditory awareness and provide some implications around pedestrian safety. Methods: 20 participants sitting at the centre of a 12-speaker array completed a localisation and detection task. This was done in three conditions: without PMP and headphones, with PMP and headphones, with headphones alone. Three different headphone styles were investigated in this study: earbuds, in-ear earphones and circumaural headphones. Results: The presence of circumaural headphones and in-ear earphones alone were sufficient in affecting localisation performance. Localisation and detection performance deteriorated the most within the PMP and headphone conditions for the circumaural headphones and in-ear earphones. Deterioration in detection performance was only significantly observed in several participants. Earbuds were found to have the smallest effect on performance. Conclusions: The use of PMP negatively affected localisation and detection performance in a group of normal hearers, although this was dependent on factors such as headphone style, music genre, and listener’s preferred listening level (PLL). PMP-using pedestrians are encouraged to use earbuds with their PMP devices to allow for optimal external sound awareness.