Using Virtual Reality Techniques to Study Cognitive Processes in Car Driving Activity

A central question in cognitive sciences is how behaviors adapted to the situations encountered are produced. This question can be addressed in different ways and often requires the researcher to choose between highly controlled and standardized laboratory situations (commonly referred to as artificial settings) and studies undertaken in natural settings which may be more realistic, but cannot be controlled as required by a rigorous scientific approach. Using car driving as an example, our study will show how virtual reality (VR) offers a compromise between these two alternatives. Indeed, VR can simulate controlled immersive environments that offer different levels of realism. Moreover, VR makes it possible to implement different devices. For instance, VR enables researchers to analyze oculomotor behavior, which is fundamental in the field of car driving and is considered an indicator of attentional deployment. The work presented in this paper is based on a car driving simulator curre ntly under development and aimed at studying the cognitive processes involved in car driving such as attentional processes and anticipatory mechanisms

Different forms of attentional disturbances involved in driving accidents

Attentional processes are necessary for any complex activity, such as driving. When a driver's attention is not optimal, driving errors can arise. The aim of this study is to highlight the involvement of attentional problems and their weight in accident production, using data from in-depth accident analyses. Three attentional disturbances are distinguished according to the task that competes with the driving activity: inattention, attention competition and distraction. Inattention is the defect most frequently represented (74%) compared with attention competition (18%) and distraction (8%). Overall, attentional disturbances mainly lead to detection failures (44.7%). In more than half of the cases, other factors are required for a driving error to emerge. The interest of studying human failures linked to attentional disturbances is that it provides a definition of driver's needs in terms of assistance, thus identifying which systems are the most relevant and, on the contrary, which might reduce the attention capacities required for driving

[Occurrence of Trichinella spp. in wild boar in Switzerland]

Trichinellosis is a worldwide occurring zoonosis caused by the intracellular nematode Trichinella spp. One of the main infection sources in Europe is raw or undercooked meat from wild boar. Trichinella britovi is prevalent in wild carnivores in Switzerland, thus a possible inclusion of wild boar in this wildlife cycle cannot be excluded. In order to assess the prevalence of Trichinella infection in wild boar, we tested 1,458 animals with both parasitological and serological methods. In none of the animals Trichinella-larvae could be recovered by the artificial digestion method (prevalence of larvae: 0 %; 95 % CI 0.0 - 0.3). Antibodies in meat juice were detected in 57 animals using a standardized E/S-Ag-ELISA. However, in the confirmatory westernblot, only 3 animals remained seropositive (seroprevalence: 0.2 %; 95 % CI 0.07 %-0.60 %). The occurrence of wild boar positive for anti-Trichinella-antibodies indicates that meat inspection for Trichinella-larvae in this species is important to prevent human infections

Continuous monitoring of bovine spongiform encephalopathy rapid test performance by weak positive tissue controls and quality control charts

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) rapid tests and routine BSE-testing laboratories underlie strict regulations for approval. Due to the lack of BSE-positive control samples, however, full assay validation at the level of individual test runs and continuous monitoring of test performance on-site is difficult. Most rapid tests use synthetic prion protein peptides, but it is not known to which extend they reflect the assay performance on field samples, and whether they are sufficient to indicate on-site assay quality problems. To address this question we compared the test scores of the provided kit peptide controls to those of standardized weak BSE-positive tissue samples in individual test runs as well as continuously over time by quality control charts in two widely used BSE rapid tests. Our results reveal only a weak correlation between the weak positive tissue control and the peptide control scores. We identified kit-lot related shifts in the assay performances that were not reflected by the peptide control scores. Vice versa, not all shifts indicated by the peptide control scores indeed reflected a shift in the assay performance. In conclusion these data highlight that the use of the kit peptide controls for continuous quality control purposes may result in unjustified rejection or acceptance of test runs. However, standardized weak positive tissue controls in combination with Shewhart-CUSUM control charts appear to be reliable in continuously monitoring assay performance on-site to identify undesired deviations