(Ingezonden) The failure to respond to changes in the road environment: Does road familiarity play a role?

Road signs do not necessarily lead to the right response. Especially when signs are changed, drivers may not always detect new signs and may therefore fail to respond correctly to the situation indicated. The present driving simulator study investigated whether road familiarity (increased exposure to the same road) influenced failure to respond...

COSFIRE: A Brain-Inspired Approach to Visual Pattern Recognition

The primate visual system has an impressive ability to generalize and to discriminate between numerous objects and it is robust to many geometrical transformations as well as lighting conditions. The study of the visual system has been an active reasearch field in neuropysiology for more than half a century. The construction of computational...

Behavioral Adaptation and Acceptance

One purpose of Intelligent Vehicles is to improve road safety, throughput, and emissions. However, the predicted effects are not always as large as aimed for. Part of this is due to indirect behavioral changes of drivers, also called behavioral adaptation. Behavioral adaptation (BA) refers to unintended behavior that arises following a change to...

Change detection in traffic: Where do we look and what do we perceive?

The current study focuses on Change Blindness in a road environment. The purpose of the experiment is to study how the type of change induced affects the strength of Change Blindness and the role of glance duration and attention. Hundred-thirty-one participants watched video films showing six drives around a block filmed from the drivers...

Do familiarity and expectations change perception? Drivers’ glances and response to changes

The present study shows that repeated exposure to a road environment changes eye movement behaviour. In addition, repeated exposure may result in inadequate responses to unexpected changes in the road environment. Participants drove a low-cost simulator while their eye movements were recorded. With repeated exposure participants’ glances at...

Does road familiarity change eye fixations? A comparison between watching a video and real driving

Fixation times are known to decrease after multiple exposures to the same road in simulated environments. The present study investigates whether this also holds for real driving and for watching a video, which was taped during driving (while simulating steering and braking). It appeared that the fixation times for traffic signs, information...

The failure to act upon important information: where do things go wrong?

Levels of quality of service: Recommendations

Based on a literature study and on a series of experiments conducted within TROPIC WP8, recom-mendations are provided concerning the following levels of quality of service aspects of Variable Message Signs (VMS):

Searching for traffic signals while engaged in compensatory tracking

An experiment is described in which subjects were required to search for familiar traffic signals. Half the time this was done while also engaged in a manual compensatory tracking task. The experimental variables of the visual search task were color, total number of signals exposed, the number of relevant signals, and the density of the signals....