Knowing what's coming: Anticipatory audio cues can mitigate motion sickness.

Being able to anticipate upcoming motion is known to potentially mitigate sickness resulting from provocative motion. We investigated whether auditory cues could increase anticipation and subsequently reduce motion sickness. Participants (N = 20) were exposed on a sled on a rail track to two 15-min conditions. Both were identical in terms of motion, being composed of the same repeated 9 m fore-aft displacements, with a semi-random timing of pauses and direction. The auditory cues were either 1) informative on the timing and direction of the upcoming motion, or 2) non-informative. Illness ratings were recorded at 1-min intervals using a 11-point scale. After exposure, average illness ratings were significantly lower for the condition that contained informative auditory cues, as compared to the condition without informative cues. This knowledge, i.e. that auditory signals can improve anticipation to motion, could be of importance in reducing carsickness in domains such as that of autonomous vehicles.

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Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: This research was supported by Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. There was no sponsor decisive involvement in the design of the experiment, nor in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data and the decision to submit for publication.