Does Familiarity breed inattention? Why drivers crash on the roads they know best

This paper describes our research into the nature of everyday driving, with a particular emphasis on the processes that govern driver behaviour in familiar, well - practiced situations. The research examined the development and maintenance of proceduralised driving habits in a high-fidelity driving simulator by paying 29 participants to drive a simulated road regularly over three months of testing. A range of measures, including detection task performance and driving performance were collected over the course of 20 sessions. Performance from a yoked control group who experienced the same road scenarios in a single session was also measured. The data showed the development of stereotyped driving patterns and changes in what drivers noticed, indicative of in attentional blindness and “driving without awareness”. Extended practice also resulted in increased sensitivity for detecting changes to foveal road features associated with vehicle guidance and performance on an embedded vehicle detection task (detection of a specific vehicle type). The changes in attentional focus and driving performance resulting from extended practice help explain why drivers are at increased risk of crashing on roads they know well. Identifying the features of familiar roads that attract driver attention, even when they are driving without awareness, can inform new interventions and designs for safer roads. The data also provide new light on a range of previous driver behaviour research including a “Tandem Model” that includes both explicit and implicit processes involved in driving performance

Solid-liquid equilibria for the dimethyl ether plus carbon dioxide binary system

A recently built experimental setup was employed for the estimation of the solid-liquid equilibria of alternative refrigerants systems. The behavior of dimethyl ether (DME) + carbon dioxide was measured down to temperatures of 131.6 K. To confirm the reliability of the apparatus, the triple point of the DME was measured. The triple point data measured revealed a good consistency with the literature. The results obtained for the mixtures were corrected by the Rossini method and interpreted by means of the Schröder equation. © 2010 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary

On galaxy rotation curves from a continuum mechanics approach to modified gravity

We consider a modification of General Relativity motivated by the treatment of anisotropies in Continuum Mechanics. The Newtonian limit of the theory is formulated and applied to galactic rotation curves. By assuming that the additional structure of spacetime behaves like a Newtonian gravitational potential for small deviations from isotropy, we are able to recover the Navarro-Frenk-White profile of dark matter halos by a suitable identification of constants. We consider the Burkert profile in the context of our model and also discuss rotation curves more generally.Comment: 8 pages; v2 11 pages, heavily revised version, new title; v3 13 pages final versio

Giving subjects the eye and showing them the finger: socio-biological cues and saccade generation in the anti-saccade task.

Pointing with the eyes or the finger occurs frequently in social interaction to indicate direction of attention and one's intentions. Research with a voluntary saccade task (where saccade direction is instructed by the colour of a fixation point) suggested that gaze cues automatically activate the oculomotor system, but non-biological cues, like arrows, do not. However, other work has failed to support the claim that gaze cues are special. In the current research we introduced biological and non-biological cues into the anti-saccade task, using a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). The anti-saccade task recruits both top ^ down and bottom^ up attentional mechanisms, as occurs in naturalistic saccadic behaviour. In experiment 1 gaze, but not arrows, facilitated saccadic reaction times (SRTs) in the opposite direction to the cues over all SOAs, whereas in experiment 2 directional word cues had no effect on saccades. In experiment 3 finger pointing cues caused reduced SRTs in the opposite direction to the cues at short SOAs. These findings suggest that biological cues automatically recruit the oculomotor system whereas non- biological cues do not. Furthermore, the anti-saccade task set appears to facilitate saccadic responses in the opposite direction to the cues