729 research outputs found
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Familiarity and Distraction Affect Drivers’ Responses to In-Vehicle Warnings for a Hazard that is Not Yet Visible
No full textOn-road experiments measured drivers’ initial responses to in-vehicle emergency electronic brake light (EEBL) warnings indicating hard braking by some vehicle in the lane ahead. Participants drove within a platoon of four research vehicles on an Interstate highway with other traffic present. Speed and time gap between the participant’s vehicle and the vehicle immediately ahead were measured before and after a warning was triggered. This paper examines the effects of prior training about EEBL warnings and driver distraction on responses to the warning when the hazard (braking vehicle in lane ahead) was blocked from view by an intervening vehicle. An EEBL warning, if effective, should encourage drivers to immediately reduce their speed and increase the time gap between their vehicle and the vehicle ahead. We hypothesized that the warning would be more effective for drivers who had received training about the meaning of EEBL warnings as compared to naïve drivers; and more effective for visually distracted drivers as compared to drivers who were looking ahead but saw no hazard when the warning was triggered. Results suggest that speed reductions following onset of the warning were increased by training and decreased by distraction. The EEBL warning elicited the most robust response from drivers who were not distracted and from those had been trained about the warning system. There was no evidence for an interaction between these two factors. These results suggest that training drivers about vehicle safety systems may increase proper behavioral responses, thereby increasing the effectiveness of in-vehicle warnings
Vehicle Accessibility: Association with Novice Teen Driving Conditions
No full textNovice teen drivers have disproportionally elevated crash rate compared to older drivers’. The high crash rate among novices is generally attributed to multiple risk factors, including driving inexperience, young age, risky driving behavior, vehicle accessibility, time of day, and driving with teenage passengers. The current naturalistic driving study with novice-teenagers evaluated the associations between vehicle accessibility (primary or shared) and driving conditions. Of 83 study participants 55 had primary vehicle access. Teens who shared a vehicle drove 22% more miles with an adult passenger in the vehicle compared to teens with primary vehicle access. Primary vehicle access was significantly associated with increased driving exposure (i.e. number of trips and miles driven) and driving with teen passengers. Driving with an adult present is protective, while greater exposure and driving with teenage passengers are known risk factors. Our findings indicate that primary vehicle access increases exposure overall and to driving with teen passengers, thereby increasing crash risk
Calling While Driving: An Initial Experiment with HoloLens
No full textWe investigate the visual distraction of drivers when they use an augmented reality (AR) device (HoloLens) for video calling while driving. The work is motivated by the advent of novel AR technology and by research on context sharing between callers. Both suggest that AR might soon be appropriated for 2- way video calling in cars, yet little is known on how distracting this is to the driver. Our participants drove in a simulator while engaged in a Skype conversation. We compared a condition with a video presentation (through AR), and a speech-only condition. We found that participants hardly looked at the video, perhaps because it was not visible from peripheral vision without making a head movement. In this way, HoloLens was less distracting visually than a monitor display used in earlier work. Although less distraction is desirable, using HoloLens also has a drawback: when drivers did look at the video they had to turn their head away from the road to look to the right, and down. The work makes suggestions on how to further study the safety and other issues of this new technology
Effects of In-Vehicle Messaging on Mental Workload During Driving through Work Zones
No full textDriving through work zones is especially risky. This study investigates a potential strategy for warning drivers of important events during work zone driving using in-vehicle smartphone messages. Participants used a driving simulator to drive through two different work zones. Work zone events were communicated either by roadside signage, through audio messages or through audio-visual messages on a smartphone placed either on the dashboard or the passenger seat of the vehicle. Subjective measures of mental workload and usability, along with event recall, were recorded for each drive. The overall pattern of results suggests reduced mental workload and better usability for in-vehicle smartphone messages. In-vehicle message systems may be a promising approach for improving driver safety in the work zone
Evaluating Fitness to Drive in Elderly with Subjective Cognitive Decline
No full textMaintaining independent mobility and the ability to drive contributes greatly to the quality of life of elderly. However, decline of functional abilities, such as cognitive decline, can reduce elderly’s fitness to drive and pose a risk for traffic safety. The current study aims to compose a test battery of functional ability tests to predict fitness to drive in elderly with subjective cognitive decline in the doctor’s office. Functional ability tests were used as predictors for on-road driving assessment outcome. Passing or failing the on-road test was best predicted by a battery of tests addressing visual and motor ability and knowledge factors. This selection of tests can be administered in an office setting within a reasonable time frame and allows medical professionals to provide patients with well-argued advice concerning their fitness to drive. Further research is needed to improve diagnostic accuracy of off-road fitness to drive screenings for elderly drivers
Perceiving the Roadway in the Blink of an Eye-Rapid Perception of the Road Environment and Prediction of Events
No full textThis study investigated how quickly participants could develop a functional mental representation of a real-world road scene, based on briefly viewed recorded video. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, we recruited 27 participants and collected 25k individual trials assessing the development of a percept of the road environment. This was operationalized as the duration of road video required for participants to predict which of two temporally spaced images would happen next. We found that participants could begin to build a representation of the road environment with as little as 100 ms of viewed road video and that the representation improved with additional video. These results suggest that drivers may begin to construct robust, predictive mental representations of the road environment with the briefest of glances, and the more information available to them, the more robust these representations are. While 100 ms of eyes-on-road time is insufficient to ensure safe driving, comprehension of the road environment begins in the blink of an eye
Examining the Effectiveness of Forward Collision Warnings for Drowsy Drivers
Full text linkForward collision warnings (FCW) offer the potential to reduce frontal crashes by alerting drivers and are becoming standard in vehicles. These systems are largely intended to alert distracted drivers, but a pending question is the efficacy of FCW alerts for other types of impairment that might slow reaction time. To that end, this study examined the effectiveness of auditory and haptic FCW for drowsy drivers using a high-fidelity motion-base driving simulator. Overall, there was no evidence of that FCWs altered the response behavior of drowsy drivers relative to a group of drowsy drivers that did not receive a warning. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for design of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and driver state monitoring
Predictors of Mind-Wandering While Driving
No full textMind-wandering occurs when individuals experience task-unrelatedthoughts, which can interfere with their performance. The goal of this study was to investigate mind-wandering while driving, as predicted both by time on task, and by individual differences in executive working memory, as measured by the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). Participants completed a total of three drives during their hour in the driving simulator. During these drives, participants were periodically asked whether they were thinking of driving; the proportion of trials where they reported they were not thinking of driving was used as an index of mind-wandering. As a secondary index, at the end of each drive, participants also rated how difficult they felt it was to focus during the drive. Driving speed, steering variability, and self-report driving performance were also recorded. As predicted, self-reports indicated that drivers had increased difficulty focusing their attention with time on task, particularly in the last two drives; however, the increase in off-task thoughts per drive did not reach significance. Similarly, although driving speed increased as a function of time-on-task, and SART scores predicted driving speed, the interaction between SART scores and time-on-task did not have the predicted effect on steering variability. Overall, the best predictors of mind-wandering were fatigue and number of hours of sleep the previous night. Lastly, those who reported more mind-wandering also reported more instances of emotional rumination (e.g., worries, feeling guilty)
Considering the Human Across Levels of Automation: Implications for Reliance
No full textThis paper introduces human considerations that have yet to be fully addressed in industry standards for levels of automation. Currently-deployed vehicle automation is discussed according to these standards from a human interaction framing. The taxonomy-centric description of individual features provides insights into the challenges drivers may have in use of features in actual driving conditions. Initial data from an on-going naturalistic driving study of Tesla drivers is presented as a first-look at the prevalence of interaction challenges in real-world automation based on technology use. Implications for system design and training are discussed with the aim of centering industry and policy discussions on human-centric technology development
Factors Contributing to Self-Reported Cell Phone Usage by Younger Drivers in the Pacific Northwest
No full textUsing a cell phone while driving has been shown to have a negative impact on driver performance. To determine why younger drivers persist in using cell phones while driving, underlying causal factors which contribute to selfreported usage were investigated. A total of 2,340 drivers, from high schools and universities located in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington responded to a survey instrument. Drivers were asked to self-report their frequency of distraction and their opinion about what activities are driving distractions. The objective was to determine what factors impact the driver choice to interact with a cell phone (talking or texting) while driving. A random parameter ordered-probit model was developed to predict the likelihood that a driver self-reported cell phone activity while driving as “infrequent”, “moderate”, or “frequent”. It was found that the behaviors of texting and talking while driving were highly correlated. The developed models suggest that presence of friends in the car, parents frequently exhibiting distracted driving, more miles of driving, history of speeding tickets, crash history, having a full driver’s license, owning an iPhone, and being female increases the likelihood of self-reported distracted driving. It was found that experienced drivers were more likely to talk and less likely to text while driving