Cross-Modal Memory Support in Visually Demanding

Environments: A Controlled Study of Haptic Pulses and Spatial

Audio Cues for Reducing Prospective Memory Failures During

Multitasking

A. Nithya1,* B. Chitra2 V. Sathya Preiya3

1 Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, St. Joseph’s College of Engineering, India

2 Assistant Professor, Department of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, Panimalar Engineering College, India

3 Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, S.A. Engineering College, Chennai, India

Received: September 24, 2025 Revised: November 05, 2025 Accepted: December 09, 2025 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

When people are immersed in a visually demanding task, the attentional resources required to monitor the environment

for cues that should trigger a remembered intention are frequently captured by the primary task, causing prospective

memory failures that range from the inconvenient to the safety-critical. This problem is pervasive in modern work

environments in which digital interfaces compete continuously for visual attention, yet the overwhelming majority of

reminder and notification systems rely on the same visual channel that is already congested. This paper reports a

controlled user study examining whether carefully designed haptic and spatial audio cues can compensate for this

visual saturation and restore prospective memory performance without substantially increasing cognitive burden.

Thirty-two participants completed a counterbalanced within-subjects protocol in which they performed primary

cognitive tasks—document editing on a virtual desktop and navigating in a driving simulation—while managing

a set of time-critical intentions delivered through four reminder conditions: visual-only, haptic-only, spatial audio

only, and the combined haptic-plus-audio channel. The study measures prospective memory hit rate, task-switching

errors, cue response latency, and multidimensional subjective workload across both scenarios and all four conditions.

Results consistently favour the combined modality, which produces substantially fewer memory failures and lower

reported workload than any single channel, while individual differences in baseline workload predict the magnitude

of benefit from non-visual cueing. These findings carry direct implications for the design of ambient notification

systems in high-demand professional and safety-critical environments.

Keywords: Prospective memory Haptic feedback Spatial audio Multitasking Cognitive load Task interruption

Vibrotactile Reminder systems Human-computer interaction

1. INTRODUCTION

Remembering to perform an intended action at the right moment

in the future — prospective memory, in the cognitive

science literature — is a mundane but consequential cognitive

process [1]. When attention is fractured across multiple

simultaneous demands, as it routinely is in modern office,

transportation, and healthcare work, the monitoring process

that underlies prospective memory competes directly with the