Longitudinal and Concurrent Effortful Control as Predictors of Risky Bicycling in Adolescence: Moderating Effects of Age and Gender.

OBJECTIVE: Collisions between bicycles and motor vehicles are one of the leading risk factors for injury and death in childhood and adolescence. We examined longitudinal and concurrent effortful control (EC) as predictors of risky bicycling behavior in early- to mid-adolescence, with age and gender as moderators. We also examined whether EC was associated with parent-reported real-world bicycling behavior and all lifetime unintentional injuries. METHODS: Parent-reported EC measures were collected when children (N = 85) were 4 years old and when they were either 10 years (N = 42) or 15 years (N = 43) old. We assessed risky bicycling behavior by asking the adolescents to bicycle across roads with high-density traffic in an immersive virtual environment. Parents also reported on children's real-world bicycling behavior and lifetime unintentional injuries at the time of the bicycling session. RESULTS: We found that both longitudinal and concurrent EC predicted adolescents' gap choices, though these effects were moderated by age and gender. Lower parent-reported early EC in younger and older girls predicted a greater willingness to take tight gaps (3.5 s). Lower parent-reported concurrent EC in older boys predicted a greater willingness to take gaps of any size. Children lower in early EC started bicycling earlier and were rated as less cautious bicyclists as adolescents. Adolescents lower in concurrent EC were also rated as less cautious bicyclists and had experienced more lifetime unintentional injuries requiring medical attention. CONCLUSION: Early measures of child temperament may help to identify at-risk populations who may benefit from parent-based interventions.

Do Simulated Augmented Reality Overlays Influence Street-Crossing Decisions for Non-Mobility-Impaired Older and Younger Adult Pedestrians?

OBJECTIVE: This study used a virtual environment to examine how older and younger pedestrians responded to simulated augmented reality (AR) overlays that indicated the crossability of gaps in a continuous stream of traffic. BACKGROUND: Older adults represent a vulnerable group of pedestrians. AR has the potential to make the task of street-crossing safer and easier for older adults. METHOD: We used an immersive virtual environment to conduct a study with age group and condition as between-subjects factors. In the control condition, older and younger participants crossed a continuous stream of traffic without simulated AR overlays. In the AR condition, older and younger participants crossed with simulated AR overlays signaling whether gaps between vehicles were safe or unsafe to cross. Participants were subsequently interviewed about their experience. RESULTS: We found that participants were more selective in their crossing decisions and took safer gaps in the AR condition as compared to the control condition. Older adult participants also reported reduced mental and physical demand in the AR condition compared to the control condition. CONCLUSION: AR overlays that display the crossability of gaps between vehicles have the potential to make street-crossing safer and easier for older adults. Additional research is needed in more complex real-world scenarios to further examine how AR overlays impact pedestrian behavior. APPLICATION: With rapid advances in autonomous vehicle and vehicle-to-pedestrian communication technologies, it is critical to study how pedestrians can be better supported. Our research provides key insights for ways to improve pedestrian safety applications using emerging technologies like AR.

How Do Child ADHD Symptoms and Oppositionality Impact Parent-Child Interactions When Crossing Virtual Roads?

OBJECTIVE: This study examined how parents and children interact when crossing virtual roads together. We examined (1) whether children's inattention/hyperactivity and oppositionality and children's failure to jointly perform the task interfered with parents' efforts to scaffold children's road-crossing skill and (2) whether experience with the joint road-crossing task impacted children's subsequent performance in a solo road-crossing task. METHODS: Fifty-five 8- to 10-year-old children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and their parents first jointly crossed a lane of traffic in an immersive pedestrian simulator. Children then completed the same road-crossing task alone. Parents completed questionnaires about children's symptoms of inattention/hyperactivity and oppositionality. RESULTS: Analyses of the joint road-crossing task showed that when parents and children crossed different gaps, parents suggested and opposed more gaps and were less likely to use a prospective gap communication strategy (i.e., communicating about a crossable gap prior to its arrival). Crossing different gaps was also associated with increased expressions of negative affect among parents and children and an increase in collisions among children. Children's level of parent-reported oppositionality also predicted an increase in child defiance and parental redirection of child behavior. Analyses of children's subsequent crossing performance indicated that parents' use of a prospective gap communication strategy during the joint road-crossing task predicted selection of larger gaps during the solo crossing task. CONCLUSIONS: Not crossing through the same gap and increased levels of child oppositionality interfered with the scaffolding process, potentially informing future parent-based intervention efforts for increasing children's road-crossing safety.

Do Inattention/Hyperactivity and Motor Timing Predict Children's Virtual Road-Crossing Performance?

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this investigation was to examine how individual variation in inattention and hyperactivity is related to motor timing difficulties and whether children's performance on simple laboratory timing tasks is related to their performance on a virtual road-crossing task using a head-mounted virtual reality display system. METHODS: Participants were a community sample of 92 9- to 11-year-old children. Parents completed questionnaires assessing their child's inattention and hyperactivity. Children completed two simple motor timing tasks (duration discrimination and synchronization-continuation) and crossed roads with continuous traffic in a head-mounted VR system. RESULTS: Higher parent-reported inattention and hyperactivity predicted poorer performance in the duration discrimination and synchronization-continuation tasks, but not the virtual pedestrian road-crossing task. Children with higher tap onset asynchrony in the synchronization-continuation task had poorer timing of entry into the gap in the virtual pedestrian road-crossing task. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide further evidence that timing deficits are associated with individual differences in inattention and hyperactivity and that timing difficulties may be a risk factor for functional difficulties in everyday life.

Let's Cross the Next One: Parental Scaffolding of Prospective Control Over Movement.

This investigation examined parental scaffolding of children's prospective control over decisions and actions during a joint perception-action task. Parents and their 6-, 8-, 10-, and 12-year-old children (N = 128) repeatedly crossed a virtual roadway together. Guidance and control shifted from the parent to the child with increases in child age. Parents more often chose the gap that was crossed and prospectively communicated the gap choice with younger than older children. Greater use of an anticipatory gap selection strategy by parents predicted more precise timing of entry into the gap by children. This work suggests that social interaction may serve as an important experiential mechanism for the development of prospective control over decisions and actions in the perception-action domain.

How Does Crossing Roads with Friends Impact Risk Taking in Young Adolescents and Adults?

OBJECTIVE: The goal of this investigation was to examine how crossing roads with a friend versus alone affects gap decisions and movement timing in young adolescents and adults. METHODS: Ninety-six 12-year-olds and adults physically crossed a single lane of continuous traffic in an immersive pedestrian simulator. Participants completed 30 crossings either with a friend or alone. Participants were instructed to cross the road without being hit by a car, but friend pairs were not instructed to cross together. RESULTS: Pairs of adolescent friends exhibited riskier road-crossing behavior than pairs of adult friends. For gaps crossed together, adult pairs were more discriminating in their gap choices than adult solo crossers, crossing fewer of the smaller gaps and more of the larger gaps. This pattern did not hold for 12-year-old pairs compared to 12-year-old solo crossers. To compensate for their less discriminating gap choices, pairs of 12-year-olds adjusted their movement timing by entering and crossing the road more quickly. For gaps crossed separately, both adult and 12-year-old first crossers chose smaller gaps than second crossers. Unlike adults, 12-year-old first crossers were significantly less discriminating in their gap choices than 12-year-old second crossers. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to adults, young adolescents took riskier gaps in traffic when crossing virtual roads with a friend than when crossing alone. Given that young adolescents often cross roads together in everyday life, peer influences may pose a significant risk to road safety in early adolescence.

Mother-child communication about relative proximity to a landmark: What role does prototypicality play?

This investigation examined how prototypicality affects mother-child communication about relative proximity. In the first two experiments, mothers of 2.5-, 3.0-, and 3.5-year-old children verbally disambiguated a target hiding container from an identical non-target hiding container when the two containers were placed at a smaller (more prototypical) or larger (less prototypical) distance from a landmark. Children then searched for the hidden object. When the absolute distance was smaller, mothers used more consistent frames of reference in their directions and even 2.5-year-olds largely followed those directions successfully. When the absolute distance was larger, mothers used multiple reference frames in their directions (a "kitchen sink" strategy) and children had more difficulty in following directions (especially 2.5-year-olds). A third experiment in which we controlled mothers' directions confirmed that the increased absolute distance, and not the mothers' direction-giving strategies, led to 2.5-year-olds' impaired search performance. These results indicate that young children's understanding of relative proximity develops from more prototypical cases (smaller distances) to less prototypical cases (larger distances) and that mothers' attempts to compensate for young children's difficulty with less prototypical cases did not improve their search performance.

Harnessing Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) Communication Technology: Sending Traffic Warnings to Texting Pedestrians.

OBJECTIVE: We examined how sending mobile-device warnings to texting pedestrians when they initiate an unsafe road crossing influences their decisions and actions. BACKGROUND: Pedestrian texting has been identified as a key risk factor in pedestrian-vehicle collisions. Advances in sensing and communications technology offer the possibility of providing pedestrians with information about traffic conditions to assist them in safely crossing traffic-filled roadways. However, it is unclear how this information can be most effectively communicated to pedestrians. METHOD: We examined how texting and nontexting pedestrians crossed roads with continuous traffic in a large-screen, immersive pedestrian simulator using a between-subjects design with three conditions: texting, warning, and control. Texting participants in the warning condition received an alarm on their cell phone when they began to cross a dangerously small gap. RESULTS: The results demonstrate the detrimental influence of texting on pedestrians' gap selection, movement timing, and gaze behavior, and show the potential of warnings to improve decision making and safety. However, the results also reveal the limits of warning texting participants once they initiate a crossing and possible overreliance on technology that may lead to reduced situation awareness. CONCLUSION: Mobile devices and short-range communication technologies offer enormous potential to assist pedestrians, but further study is needed to better understand how to provide useful information in a timely manner. APPLICATION: The technology for communicating traffic information to pedestrians via mobile devices is on the horizon. Research on how such information influences all aspects of pedestrian behavior is critical to developing effective solutions.

Linking "what" and "where" information: How the strength of object categories influences children's memory for object locations.

We conducted three experiments to examine how the degree of category relatedness among objects in a group affects the magnitude of spatial bias in memory for their locations. Four age groups-7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and adults-learned the locations of 20 objects marked by dots on a touchscreen monitor. After learning the object locations, participants attempted to place the objects without the aid of the dots. We compared spatial bias at test (i.e., placing objects in the same quadrant closer together than they really were) when objects within the same quadrant were strongly related versus unrelated (Experiment 1) or weakly related versus unrelated (Experiment 2). The 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults exhibited significant spatial bias when groups of objects were composed of either strongly or weakly related exemplars, but the 7-year-olds exhibited significant spatial bias only when the objects were strongly related. A third experiment revealed that the 7-year-olds exhibited only marginally significant spatial bias when objects within the same quadrant were weakly related and we cued them about the category labels beforehand. The General Discussion focuses on developmental changes in bottom-up associative processes and top-down strategic processes in memory for object locations.

Risky bicycling behavior among youth with and without attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

BACKGROUND: Injury risk from car-bicycle collisions is particularly high among youth with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Here, we capitalized on advances in virtual environment technology to safely and systematically examine road-crossing behavior among child cyclists with and without ADHD. METHODS: Sixty-three youth (26 with ADHD, 37 non-ADHD controls) ages 10-14 years crossed 12 intersections with continuous cross-traffic while riding a high-fidelity bicycling simulator. Traffic density (i.e., temporal gaps between vehicles) was manipulated to examine the impact of varying traffic density on behavioral indices of road crossing, including gap selection, timing of entry into the roadway, time to spare when exiting the roadway, and close calls with oncoming cars. In addition, parents filled out questionnaires assessing their child's ADHD symptomatology, temperamental characteristics, bicycling experience, and injury history. RESULTS: ADHD youth largely chose the same size gaps as non-ADHD youth, although ADHD youth were more likely to select smaller gap sizes following exposure to high-density traffic. In addition, youth with ADHD demonstrated poorer movement timing when entering the intersection, resulting in less time to spare when exiting the roadway. Hyperactivity-impulsivity symptoms were specifically associated with selection of smaller gaps, whereas timing deficits were specifically associated with inattention and inhibitory control. CONCLUSION: Findings highlight two related yet potentially dissociable mechanisms that may influence injury risk among youth with ADHD and provide a foundation for development of injury prevention strategies.

Parent-Child Injury Prevention Conversations Following a Trip to the Emergency Department.

OBJECTIVES: The goal of the study was to examine how parents use conversation to promote the internalization of safety values after their child has been seriously injured. METHODS: Parent interviews detailing postinjury conversations were coded for strategies mentioned to prevent injuries in the future and information about circumstances surrounding the injury. RESULTS: Logistic regression analyses revealed that parents were more likely to discuss why an activity was dangerous with older than younger children, and were more likely to urge daughters than sons to be more careful in the future. Injuries resulting from the presence of environmental hazards predicted parents telling children to be more careful in the future. Having others involved predicted parents urging children not to engage in the behavior again. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that parents modulated strategies according to age, gender, and injury circumstances to maximize the likelihood that children would behave differently in the future.

Mother-child conversations about safety: implications for socializing safety values in children.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined how mothers socialize their children about safety through conversations about potentially unsafe activities. METHODS: Mothers and their 8- and 10-year-old children discussed and rated the safety of 12 photographs depicting another same-gender child engaged in potentially dangerous activities. RESULTS: Conversations usually unfolded with children giving the first rating or rationale, followed by additional discussion between the mother and child. Mothers and children relied on 2 main types of rationales to justify their ratings: potential outcomes of the activity and specific features of the situation (dangerous and nondangerous). Mothers (but not children) used dangerous feature rationales more often than dangerous outcome rationales. When disagreements arose, mothers typically guided children to adopt their own rating rather than the child's rating. Additionally, children who used more nondangerous feature and outcome rationales had experienced more injuries requiring medical attention. CONCLUSIONS: Mothers' focus on dangerous features appears to reflect their efforts to help children make causal connections between dangerous elements of the situation and adverse outcomes that might result.

How children and adults learn to intercept moving gaps.

We used an immersive virtual environment to examine how children and adults learn to intercept moving gaps and whether children and adults benefit from variability of practice. Children (10- and 12-year-olds) and adults attempted to bicycle between two moving vehicle-size blocks without stopping. In Experiment 1, block motions were timed such that if participants maintained a constant speed, they would intercept the gap between the blocks. By the last set of intersections, adults learned to maintain a constant speed throughout the approach to the intersection, 12-year-olds exhibited less variability in time-to-spare when they intercepted the blocks, and 10-year-olds exhibited no significant change across intersection sets. In Experiment 2, block motions during the first eight intersections were timed such that participants needed to either speed up or slow down on all intersections or needed to speed up on half and slow down on half of the intersections. On the last four intersections, all age groups encountered a novel block timing in which no adjustment in speed was necessary to intercept the blocks. The adults performed well regardless of whether they experienced consistent or variable block timings. The 10-year-olds in the variable condition performed better on slow-down trials than their peers in the slow-down condition but performed worse on speed-up trials than their peers in the speed-up condition. Discussion focuses on possible developmental changes in reliance on perceptually available and remembered information in complex perception-action tasks.

How do bicyclists respond to vehicles with adaptive headlamp systems? A nighttime study in an immersive virtual environment.

INTRODUCTION: The risk of motor vehicle-bicyclist crashes and fatalities is greater during nighttime than daytime lighting conditions, even though there are fewer cyclists on roadways at night. Vehicle Adaptive Headlamp Systems (AHS) aim to increase the visibility of bicyclists for drivers by directing a spotlight to illuminate bicyclists on or near the roadway. AHS technology also serves to alert bicyclists to the approaching vehicle by illuminating the road beneath the rider and by projecting a warning icon on the roadway. METHOD: Here, we examined how bicyclists respond to different AHS designs using a large screen, immersive virtual environment. Participants bicycled along a virtual road during nighttime lighting conditions and were overtaken by vehicles with and without an AHS system. The experiment included five treatment conditions with five different AHS designs. In each design a box of white light was projected beneath the rider; in four of the designs an icon was also projected on the road that varied in color (white or red) and position (to the left of the rider at midline or to the left of the front wheel). Participants in the control condition experienced only non-AHS vehicles. RESULTS: We found that riders in all AHS treatment conditions moved significantly farther away from overtaking vehicles with AHS systems, whereas riders in the control condition did not significantly move away from overtaking vehicles without AHS systems. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: The experiment demonstrates that AHS has potential to increase bicycling safety by influencing riders to steer away from overtaking vehicles.

Deciding when to cross in front of an autonomous vehicle: How child and adult pedestrians respond to eHMI timing and vehicle kinematics.

How autonomous vehicles (AVs) communicate their intentions to vulnerable road users (e.g., pedestrians) is a concern given the rapid growth and adoption of this technology. At present, little is known about how children respond to external Human Machine Interface (eHMI) signals from AVs. The current study examined how adults and children respond to the combination of explicit (eHMI signals) and implicit information (vehicle deceleration) to guide their road-crossing decisions. Children (8- to 12-year-olds) and adults made decisions about when to cross in front of a driverless car in an immersive virtual environment. The car sometimes stopped, either abruptly or gradually (manipulated within subjects), to allow participants to cross. When yielding, the car communicated its intent via a dome light that changed from red to green and varied in its timing onset (manipulated between subjects): early eHMI onset, late eHMI onset, or control (no eHMI). As expected, we found that both children and adults waited longer to enter the roadway when vehicles decelerated abruptly than gradually. However, adults responded to the early eHMI signal by crossing sooner when the cars decelerated either gradually or abruptly compared to the control condition. Children were heavily influenced by the late eHMI signal, crossing later when the eHMI signal appeared late and the vehicle decelerated either gradually or abruptly compared to the control condition. Unlike adults, children in the control condition behaved similarly to children in the early eHMI condition by crossing before the yielding vehicle came to a stop. Together, these findings suggest that early eHMI onset may lead to riskier behavior (initiating crossing well before a gradually decelerating vehicle comes to a stop), whereas late eHMI onset may lead to safer behavior (waiting for the eHMI signal to appear before initiating crossing). Without an eHMI signal, children show a concerning overreliance on gradual vehicle deceleration to judge yielding intent.

Preadolescent temperament and risky behavior: bicycling across traffic-filled intersections in a virtual environment.

OBJECTIVE: This investigation used a bicycling simulator to examine how preadolescent temperament is related to risky behavior. METHODS: Children aged 10 and 12 years (N = 109) rode a bicycle through a virtual environment where they crossed intersections with continuous cross traffic. Mothers filled out the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire-Revised. RESULTS: Older children and male participants timed their entry into the intersection more precisely than did younger children and female participants, as did 10-year-old children higher in inhibitory control and 10-year-old boys higher in aggression. However, only 10-year-old children higher in inhibitory control had more time to spare when they cleared the intersection. For 10-year-old boys higher in aggression, cutting in more closely behind the lead vehicle was accompanied by less stopping at intersections, less waiting before crossing, and choosing smaller gaps to cross. CONCLUSIONS: The Discussion section focuses on inhibitory control as a protective factor and aggression as a risk factor for car-bicycle collisions.

How children judge affordances when walking and bicycling across virtual roads: Does mode of locomotion matter?

This investigation examined whether the mode of locomotion matters in how 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-year-old children (N = 91) judge dynamic affordances in a complex perception-action task with significant safety risks. The primarily European American children in the sample came from the area of Iowa City, Iowa and were balanced for gender. The same children crossed a single lane of continuous traffic on foot and on bike (order counterbalanced) in identical immersive virtual environments. We found that although 8-year-olds chose significantly larger gaps when crossing on bike than on foot, these gaps were not large enough to compensate for their delay in entering the gap and their slowness in crossing the road. As a result, they ended up with less time to spare when exiting the roadway on bike than on foot. In contrast, 14-year-olds exhibited no difference in their gap choices on bike than on foot, nor did they exhibit a difference in their timing of entry into the gap. However, they crossed the road much more quickly on bike, resulting in significantly more time to spare when crossing on bike than on foot. The 10- and 12-year-olds' performance fit neatly between that of the 8- and 14-year-olds. We conclude that as children gained better control over the bike with age, they were better able to match their gap decisions with their crossing movements such that bicycling afforded even safer road-crossing than walking for 14-year-olds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

To Grasp or Not to Grasp: Infants' Actions Toward Objects and Pictures.

We conducted two experiments to address questions over whether 9-month-old infants believe that objects depicted in realistic photographs can be picked up. In Experiment 1, we presented 9-month-old infants with realistic color photographs of objects, colored outlines of objects, abstract colored "blobs," and blank pages. Infants most commonly rubbed or patted depictions of all types. They also showed significantly more grasps toward the realistic photographs than toward the colored outlines, blobs, and blank pages, but only 24% of infants directed grasping exclusively at the photographs. In Experiment 2, we further explored infants' actions toward objects and pictures while controlling for tactile information. We presented 9-month-old infants with objects and pictures of objects under a glass cover in a false-bottom table. Although there were no significant differences between the proportion of rubs and pats infants directed toward the objects versus the photographs, infants exhibited significantly more grasping toward the objects than the photographs. Together, these findings show that 9-month-old infants largely direct appropriate actions toward realistic photographs and real objects, indicating that they perceive different affordances for pictures and objects.

A comparison of daytime and nighttime pedestrian road-crossing behavior using an immersive virtual environment.

OBJECTIVE: Reduced visibility for both drivers and pedestrians is a key factor underlying the higher risk of vehicle-pedestrian collisions in dark conditions. This study investigated the extent to which pedestrians adjust for the higher risk of road crossing at night by comparing daytime and nighttime pedestrian road crossing using an immersive virtual environment. METHOD: Participants physically crossed a single lane of continuous traffic in an immersive pedestrian simulator. Participants were randomly assigned to either the daytime or the nighttime lighting condition. The primary measures were the size of the gap selected for crossing and the timing of crossing motions relative to the gap. RESULTS: The results showed that there were no significant differences in gap selection or movement timing in daytime vs. nighttime lighting conditions. However, there was a marginal increase in the time to spare after crossing the road when crossing in the dark, likely due to an accumulation of small differences in gap choices and movement timing. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that pedestrians do not adjust their road crossing to account for greater risk at night. As such, this study adds to our understanding of the potential risk factors for pedestrian injuries and fatalities in nighttime conditions.

Changes in children's perception-action tuning over short time scales: bicycling across traffic-filled intersections in a virtual environment.

This investigation examined short-term changes in child and adult cyclists' gap decisions and movement timing in response to general and specific road-crossing experiences. Children (10- and 12-year-olds) and adults rode a bicycle through a virtual environment with 12 intersections. Participants faced continuous cross traffic and waited for gaps they judged were adequate for crossing. In the control condition, participants encountered randomly ordered gaps ranging from 1.5 to 5.0s at all intersections. In the high-density condition, participants encountered high-density intersections sandwiched between sets of control intersections. These high-density intersections were designed to push participants toward taking tighter gaps. Participants in both conditions were more likely to accept 3.5-, 4.0-, 4.5-, and 5.0-s gaps at the last set of intersections than at the first set of intersections, whereas participants in the high-density condition were also more likely to accept very tight 3.0-s gaps at the last intersections than at the first intersections. Moreover, individuals in the high-density condition who waited less and took shorter gaps at the middle intersections were also more likely to take very tight 3.0-s gaps at the last intersections. The 10-year-olds in both conditions had more time to spare when they cleared the path of the oncoming car at the last intersections, whereas the 12-year-olds and adults showed no change in time to spare across intersections. The discussion focuses on linking short-term change in perceptual-motor functioning to longer term perceptual-motor development.