Alert Fatigue Research

DOI: 10.20944/preprints202603.1014.v1

Can You
Keep Up?

Alerts are streaming in. Catch the ones that matter.

Marine alerts arrive at different rates. This instrument measures how your triage accuracy changes as alert density increases. As the test progresses, alerts arrive faster and the noise-to-signal ratio increases. Can you still find the critical ones?

4 phases · 2 minutes · Progressive overload

Alerts descend from above. Move your ship and shoot them down.

Alerts drop from the top of the screen. Move your ship left and right, and fire to destroy critical and moderate alerts before they reach the deck. Let grey noise alerts pass through — shooting them is a false alarm.

Critical RED — Shoot it down
Moderate AMBER — Shoot it down
Noise GREY — Let it pass (don't shoot)

You have 3 shields. Each missed critical alert costs one.

4 phases. Alerts descend faster each phase. 2 minutes total.

PHASE 1 — CALM WATCH 02:00 remaining
Move your ship and SHOOT critical and moderate alerts. Let noise pass.
DECK
Arrow keys to move · Space / Click to fire Drag to move · Tap FIRE to shoot
🛡 🛡 🛡
HIT: 0 MISS: 0 FALSE: 0
DATA RECORDING
DEFENSES DOWN
That was 20 alerts in 30 seconds. Your MFD does this every passage.
0
/100
Your Accuracy by Phase

What Just Happened?

You just experienced triage degradation under progressive alert overload. As alert density increased from one every 5 seconds to one per second, and the ratio of critical to noise alerts shifted, your ability to filter and prioritise broke down. This mirrors what happens on a modern sailboat where an MFD generates dozens of alerts per passage. The result is predictable: critical alerts get lost in the noise.

The problem is not you. It is a system that treats every alert the same — same beep, same icon, same urgency — regardless of whether it is a collision warning or a routine GPS fix.

This instrument measures alert discrimination and triage performance under progressive cognitive load. Results contribute to published research on marine alert fatigue. DOI: 10.20944/preprints202603.1014.v1

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