The Effect of Distracted Driving on the Conspicuity of Pedestrians at Night

Between 2008 and 2018, pedestrian fatalities have increased 35 percent in the United States and nighttime fatalities are responsible for a substantial portion of this increase. There are two significant problems that limit drivers\u27 ability to respond to pedestrians at night: the degradation of drivers\u27 visual abilities due to low illumination and the low contrast of pedestrians against the background. Pedestrians can make themselves more visible to nighttime drivers by strategically placing retroreflective material on the major joints of the body to highlight their biological motion (biomotion). However, past research on pedestrian conspicuity has largely focused on drivers who are not distracted. Distracted driving is the one of most common causal factor of vehicle crashes and is increasing with advancements in technology. The purpose of this project was to assess the effect of driver distraction on the effectiveness of biomotion to enhance the conspicuity of pedestrians at night. Participants were driven along a predetermined route and asked to respond to all pedestrians they encountered. A test pedestrian was either walking or standing in place while wearing retroreflective biomotion markings. Approximately half of the participants were distracted by a secondary task that demanded cognitive, visual, and manual resources. Although highlighting the pedestrian\u27s biomotion maximized conspicuity, there was no evidence that biomotion mitigated the detrimental effects of distraction. Important limitations with the study, including the possibility that the standing pedestrian was too inconspicuous to allow for a strong test of the hypothesis, are discussed

The adaptability of women’s captivity narratives in American literature

In this analysis, I explore several women’s captivity texts to show how the captivity narrative genre has adapted to the cultural needs of its readers and authors as well as what the creation of a captivity narrative means to those involved. To examine the scope of the captivity narrative throughout time and across genres in American literature, I focus my analysis on a variety of captivity texts, written by both men and women, comprising of both fictional and true accounts of captivity: James E. Seaver’s 1824 Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, Sarah F. Wakefield’s 1864 Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees, Harriet Prescott Spofford’s 1860 “Circumstance,” and Jaycee Dugard’s 2011 A Stolen Life. Early women captives, like Jemison and Wakefield, were able to use the captivity narrative to share their experiences among the Indian people. The captivity narrative provided them with a space to have a voice in literature, and therefore in history. As the captivity narrative was appropriated into fictional stories, authors like Spofford could use the genre to create a sense of familiarity for their readers and deliver layered, cultural messages. The captivity narrative form is still prominent in contemporary literature and media. For captives like Dugard, the captivity narrative provides a space for reconstruction after captivity, in both memory and identity. Therefore, the genre is a vehicle for women’s self-expression, regardless of when it occurs, who else is involved in the creation of the text, and what the captive’s intent and purpose is in writing a captivity narrative