Listener, Task, and Auditory Graph: Toward a Conceptual Model of Auditory Graph Comprehension

Auditory graph design and implementation often has been subject to criticisms of arbitrary or atheoretical decision-making processes in both research and application. Despite increasing interest in auditory displays coupled with more than two decades of auditory graph research, no theoretical models of how a listener processes an auditory graph have been proposed. The current paper seeks to present a conceptual level account of the factors relevant to the comprehension of auditory graphs by human listeners. We attempt to make links to the relevant literature on basic auditory perception, and we offer explicit justification for, or discussion of, a number of common design practices that are often justified only implicitly or by intuition in the auditory graph literature. Finally, we take initial steps toward a qualitative, conceptual level model of auditory graph comprehension that will help to organize the available data on auditory graph comprehension and make predictions for future research and applications with auditory graphs [