Ethics or Self-Preservation? An Online Study Examining Driver Response to On-Road Obstacles During Automated Driving

In the trolley problem paradigm, a person is faced with an ethical dilemma where they must decide how to distribute inevitable loss of life such as deciding between letting five people die on the tracks in front of a trolley or pulling a lever that causes the trolley to switch to a separate track and kill one person. This online study asked participants to monitor a simulated automated vehicle and intervene if they felt the vehicle should change lanes. The results found that participants intervened roughly 96% of the time when the group of five bollards was in front of them, whether this caused them to enter an empty lane or a lane with a single alternative bollard. This suggests that drivers may respond randomly when forced to make a decision under pressure, which can lead to a worse situation.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reu2021_psychology/1008/thumbnail.jp

How Interesting Is This To You: Rating the Interestingness of Auditory Clips

Modern technological environments integrate multiple devices, competing for limited attentional resources of users. This study aimed to validate the auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) with a college student population and examine the psychological structure of task engagement. Thirty-nine students listened to thirty-nine auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) for their level of engagement. Participants rated how interesting they found the material on a slider from -7 (boring) to 7 (interesting) while listening to each clip. Participants also rated levels of difficulty, entertainment, and likelihood to attend to each clip. Participants who rated high on difficulty, entertainment, and attention also rated higher interestingness scores than those with low ratings, suggesting that these as important constituents of perceived interestingness of the auditory clips. Results indicate complexity of the psychological structure of task engagement and importance of controlling these factors in auditory stimuli to manipulate engagement.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reu2021_psychology/1011/thumbnail.jp

Age-related similarities in the attentional visual field

The visual world is cluttered, and adaptive behavior often demands attention to multiple objects. Unfortunately, compared with young adults, older adults seem to show more difficulty in dividing attention across the visual field (e.g. Ball et al., 1988), an effect often interpreted as an age-related constriction of the attentional visual field (AVF). As yet, the mechanisms underlying progressive shrinking of the AVF across lifespan remain unclear. The current work directly gauged workload capacity, C(t), calculated based on response time distributions (Townsend & Nozawa, 1995), to isolate the effects of attention and sensory limits across the visual field in young and older adults. Young and older adults made a speeded discrimination of one or two colored target letter(s) presented at varying levels of retinal eccentricity with or without the presence of clutter. In Experiment 1, surprisingly, workload capacity increased with retinal eccentricity and in the presence of clutter, and these effects were larger for older than young adults. Experiment 2 and 3 examined the influence of intertarget contingencies (Mordkoff & Yantis, 1991) on workload capacity under varying levels of clutter and target eccentricity. Data failed to find evidence of an age-related capacity gain either in the absence of intertarget contingencies or under conditions of moderate intertarget contingencies.. Experiment 4 attempted to replicate the age-related benefit found in Experiment 1, but found similarities in attentional performance across young and older adults. Meta-analysis of mean capacity scores across all four experiments indicates general age-related benefit in visual divided capacity. Meta-analyses of effects of eccentricity and clutter indicate the age-related similarities at various eccentricity and benefit in cluttered environments. The findings argue against the suggestion that peripheral visual losses in older adults are strictly attentional, and suggest instead that they are sensory or perceptual in basis

Engineering Countermeasures for Left Turns at Signalized Intersections: A Review

Left turn crashes can impact the safety of the drivers due to the speed and angle at which they occur. Left turns are specifically reported to affect older drivers more than the other types of crashes. This paper provides a review of the existing engineering countermeasures that have been evaluated to improve driver safety at left turns. Twenty- eight studies on left turn signal displays (protected left turns, flashing yellow arrow, and digital countdown timers), intersection geometry (offset left turn lanes, diverging diamond interchange, roundabouts, exit lanes for left turn, left turn bay extension, and contraflow left turn lanes), and driver warning systems (infrastructure warning systems, and in-vehicle warning systems) are reviewed. Eighteen studies were evaluated in the field, nine in laboratory environments, and one online. All countermeasures demonstrated varying levels of effectiveness. We found protected left turns, roundabouts, and warning systems to be the most effective engineering countermeasures. Advantages and disadvantages of each countermeasure and research shortcomings of the evaluation studies are discussed. Review findings may help practitioners and researchers guide more effective countermeasures for left turns for older drivers

The Gaze-Cueing Effect in the United States and Japan: Influence of Cultural Differences in Cognitive Strategies on Control of Attention

The direction of seen gaze automatically and exogenously guides visual spatial attention, a phenomenon termed as the gaze-cueing effect. Although this effect arises when the duration of stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between a non-predictive gaze cue and the target is relatively long, no empirical research examined the factors underlying this extended cueing effect. Two experiments compared the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs (700 ms) in Japanese and American participants. Cross-cultural studies on cognition suggest that Westerners tend to use a context-independent analytical strategy to process visual environments, whereas Asians use a context-dependent holistic approach. We hypothesized that Japanese participants would not demonstrate the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs because they are more sensitive to contextual information, such as the knowledge that the direction of a gaze is not predictive. Furthermore, we hypothesized that American participants would demonstrate the gaze-cueing effect at the long SOAs because they tend to follow gaze direction whether or not it is predictive. In Experiment 1, American participants demonstrated the gaze-cueing effect at the long SOA, indicating that their attention was driven by the central non-predictive gaze direction regardless of the SOAs. In Experiment 2, Japanese participants demonstrated no gaze-cueing effect at the long SOA, suggesting that the Japanese participants exercised voluntary control of their attention, which inhibited the gaze-cueing effect with the long SOA. Our findings suggest that the control of visual spatial attention elicited by social stimuli systematically differs between American and Japanese individuals

Early Visual Perception Potentiated by Object Affordances: Evidence From a Temporal Order Judgment Task

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task. The onset of the graspable (righthandled) coffee cup was perceived earlier than that of the less graspable (left-handled) cup for right-handed participants. The affordance effect was eliminated when the coffee cups were inverted, which presumably conveyed less affordance information. These results suggest that objects preattentively potentiate the perceptual entry processes in response to their affordances

Object Affordances Potentiate Responses but Do Not Guide Attentional Prioritization

Handled objects automatically activate afforded responses. The current experiment examined whether objects that afford a response are also prioritized for attentional processing in visual search. Targets were pictures of coffee cups with handles oriented either to the right or the left. Subjects searched for a target, a right-handled vs. left -handled coffee cup, among a varying number of distractor cups oriented in the opposite direction. Responses were faster when the direction of target handle and the key press were spatially matched than mismatched (stimulus -response compatibility (SRC) effect), but object affordance did not moderate slopes of the search functions, indicating the absence of attentional prioritization effect. These findings imply that handled objects prime afforded responses without influencing attentional prioritization

Creating a Driving Workload Model and Identifying Best Practices

One major way to investigate distracted driving is to have drivers engage in a secondary task. Driving models are one way to better understand workload during driving which could result in safer driving. During this study, we create a driving model using cognitive task analysis software to analyze workload with N-Back tasks. N-Back task requires the driver to memorize and repeat numbers and letters. The result will help us determine if we can continue using this software in future research and analysis workload in a scenario with secondary tasks by comparing it to other analysis software in the framework of Highway Traffic Safety Administration distraction guidelines and human subject data. We will also gain knowledge about the skill required for driving and incorporate those into our model.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reu2021_psychology/1009/thumbnail.jp

How Interesting Is This To You: Rating the Interestingness of Auditory Clips

Modern technological environments integrate multiple devices, competing for limited attentional resources of users. This study aimed to validate the auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) with a college student population and examine the psychological structure of task engagement. Thirty-nine students listened to thirty-nine auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) for their level of engagement. Participants rated how interesting they found the material on a slider from -7 (boring) to 7 (interesting) while listening to each clip. Participants also rated levels of difficulty, entertainment, and likelihood to attend to each clip. Participants who rated high on difficulty, entertainment, and attention also rated higher interestingness scores than those with low ratings, suggesting that these are important constituents of perceived interestingness of the auditory clips. Results indicate complexity of the psychological structure of task engagement and importance of controlling these factors in auditory stimuli to manipulate engagement

Large Reductions Are Possible in Older Driver Crashes at Intersections

Among all crash types, the largest percentage of older driver fatalities occur at intersections. Many explanations have been offered for older drivers\u27 increased risks of crashing at intersections; however, only recently was it determined that older drivers were much less likely to glance for latent threats after entering an intersection than middle-aged drivers. In response, training programmes were designed to increase the frequency of such glances. The programmes have proven effective, doubling the frequency of these glances for up to a period of two years post-training. The programmes take only an hour to administer and are not directly targeted at remediating any of the underlying declines in cognitive, visual or motor function that can explain the decrease in the frequency of glances for threat vehicles among older drivers. The first question we addressed was, what are the basic declines that can explain the decrease in glances for threat vehicles? The second question we addressed was, how did the training programme achieve the results it did without directly addressing these declines? We hypothesise that drivers are learning to decouple hand, foot and head movements in the training programmes and that this serialisation of behaviour essentially sidesteps the major declines in cognitive, visual and motor functions. We provide evidence that the assumptions of the decoupling hypothesis about the capabilities of older drivers when the movements are decoupled, are consistent with the evidence from existing experiments. More research is needed to evaluate this hypothesis