Detecting the Deceleration of a Lead Car during Active Control of Virtual Self Motion

Abstract

Twenty-five percent of traffic accidents involve rear-end collisions. One important factor that may contribute to such collisions is a driver's ability to detect the deceleration of a lead car. Prior studies of deceleration judgments involved passive viewing rather than active control of self motion. The primary purpose of this study was to measure effects of headway and deceleration rate on the detection of deceleration during (simulated) active control. We investigated whether the pattern of such effects was similar to those we reported previously for passive viewing. Consistent with our previous study, the current results indicated that, during active control, mean response time to detect deceleration was longer when headway was relatively far or when deceleration rate was relatively slow. The implication is that collision-avoidance warning systems may have to utilize different criteria for providing warnings under different traffic conditions.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Caird

J. K.

Hancock

P. A.

(1994). The perception of arrival time for different oncoming vehicles at an intersection. Ecological Psychology, 6, 83 109.

DeLucia

P. R.

Tharanathan

(2005). Effects of optic flow and discrete warnings on deceleration detection during car following. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 49th Annual Meeting. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

McLeod

R. W.

Ross

H. E.

(1983). Optic flow and cognitive factors in time-to-collision estimates. Perception, 12, 417 423.

Miller

Huang

(2002). An adaptive peer-to-peer collision warning system. IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, 1, 317 321.

Park

K. S.

Lee

A. J.

Koh

B. K.

(2001). Drivers' characteristics in the perception of a lead vehicle's deceleration level. International Journal of Cognitive Ergonomics, 5, 125 136.

Probst

Krafczyk

Brandt

(1987). Object-motion detection affected by concurrent self-motion perception—applied aspects for vehicle guidance. Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, 7, 309 314.

Schiff

Oldak

(1990). Accuracy of judging time to arrival: Effects of modality, trajectory, and gender. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 303 316.

Shinar

Rotenberg

Cohen

(1997). Crash reduction with an advance brake warning system: A digital simulation. Human Factors, 39, 296 302.

Stappers

P. J.

(1989). Forms can be recognized from dynamic occlusion alone. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 68, 243 251.

10.

Torf

A. S.

Duckstein

(1966). A methodology for the determination of driver perceptual latency in car following. Human Factors, 8, 441 447.

11.

Tharanathan

DeLucia

P. R.

(2006). Time-to-collision judgments of constant and non-constant velocities: Implications for rear-end collisions. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 50th Annual Meeting. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.