Relationships among driving styles, desire for control, illusion of control, and self-reported driving behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: A correlational study examined relationships among driving styles, 4 subfactors of desire for control, illusion of control, accident concern, self-rated likelihood of being involved in an accident, self-rated driving skill, and self-reported accidents, violations, and close calls. METHODS: An online sample of participants (N = 601) completed (1) the Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory (MDSI); (2) the Desirability of Control Scale (DCS); (3) an Illusion of Control Scale; (4) an accident concern self-rating, (5) a 3-item speed questionnaire; (6) a 4-item accidents, violations, and close calls questionnaire; (7) a driving skill self-rating; and (8) a demographic questionnaire. Scales were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis where appropriate. Exploratory correlational analyses examined relationships among factor scores for subscales and other variables of interest. RESULTS: The MDSI factored into 6 distinct driving styles, and the DCS factored in 4 subfactors of desire for control. Relationships among driving styles and other variables were used to create profiles of each of 6 driving styles-angry, anxious, cautious, dissociative, risky, and stress reduction-based on relationships among variables examined. CONCLUSIONS: Our results may help to identify traits that are related to driving behaviors. In general, our results showed that several maladaptive driving styles (dissociative, risky, and angry) were negatively correlated with 2 subscales of desire for control (desire to proactively seek control and desire to control making decisions) and positively correlated with illusion of control. Cautious driving style, which is adaptive, showed the opposite pattern. We also produced evidence to support the construct validity of the MDSI and added to the growing literature suggesting that the MDSI factors into 6 distinct driving styles.

Simple auditory and visual interruptions of a continuous visual tracking task: modality effects and time course of interference.

Research has produced conflicting evidence regarding whether performance of an on-going visual task is disrupted more by an interruption from a visual or an auditory alert. Tasks and alerts studied to date have been complex or idiosyncratic. This experiment examined how the modality of simple alerts-visual icons or auditory tones-affected performance of an on-going visual task. Participants (58 females and 4 males) tracked a visual target while performing a choice reaction time task in response to alerts. Visual alerts were more harmful to performance of the tracking task. Dual task workload was lowest with an auditory alert, provided there was not noise present. Interruptions affected tracking task performance for around 1500 ms. Results supported the predictions of Multiple Resources Theory and showed no evidence of auditory preemption. In practical applications for which an on-going visual task is interrupted, auditory alerts may be less disruptive and may reduce perceived workload. Practitioner Summary: Many practical scenarios involve on-going visual tasks that are interrupted by simple alerts requiring a simple response. Auditory alerts may be less disruptive than visual alerts and may reduce perceived workload. A conservative estimate is that the effects of even simple interruptions will last a minimum of 1500 ms. Abbreviations: ANOVA: analysis of variance; LSD: least significant difference; TLX: task load index.

Attributions of accidents to "human error" in news stories: Effects on perceived culpability, perceived preventability, and perceived need for punishment.

Attributions of the causes of accidents to human error are problematically reductive, yet such attributions persist in media coverage. Few experiments have examined how human error attributions affect people's perceptions. An experiment compared attributions of accidents to "human error" versus other causes ("mechanical failure," "technical error," or "computer error"). Participants (N = 971) from an online sample read one of 50 real news excerpts describing accidents from a broad array of domains (e.g., aviation, automobiles, manufacturing, and infrastructure, among others). Stories kept the same or similar details, with only the causal attribution altered to compare human error to other causes. With human error attributions, participants were in greater agreement with the statement that an individual deserved to be punished for the accident and in less agreement that an organization or company was responsible for the accident. People also perceived past human error accidents to have been more preventable, although ratings of prospective preventability were not significantly different for human error versus other attributions. The idiosyncratic details of particular accidents contributed more variance to perceptions than the causal attribution. The same pattern of results was replicated in a second experiment (N = 1195), and new analyses found no evidence that the relationship between causal attributions and perceptions was moderated by the personal relevance of the news story. Our findings suggested that, when an accident is attributed to human error in media, the public may be less likely to expect examination or mitigation of systemic shortcomings (e.g., in design, organizational practices, etc.) that precipitate accidents.

Safer than the average human driver (who is less safe than me)? Examining a popular safety benchmark for self-driving cars.

Although the level of safety required before drivers will accept self-driving cars is not clear, the criterion of being safer than a human driver has become pervasive in the discourse on vehicle automation. This criterion actually means "safer than the average human driver," because it is necessarily defined with respect to population-level data. At the level of individual risk assessment, a body of research has shown that most drivers perceive themselves to be safer than the average driver (the better-than-average effect). METHOD: Using an online sample, this study examined U.S. drivers' ratings of their own ability to drive safely and their desired level of safety for self-driving vehicles. RESULTS: This study replicated the better-than average effect and showed that most drivers stated a desire for self-driving cars that are safer than their own perceived ability to drive safely before they would: (1) feel reasonably safe riding in a self-driving vehicle; (2) buy a self-driving vehicle, all other things (cost, etc.) being equal; and (3) allow self-driving vehicles on public roads. CONCLUSIONS: Since most drivers believe they are better than average drivers, the benchmark of achieving automation that is safer than a human driver (on average) may not represent acceptably safe performance of self-driving cars for most drivers. Practical applications: If perceived level of safety is an important contributor to acceptance of self-driving vehicles, the popular "safer than a human driver" benchmark may not be adequate for widespread acceptance.

Maintenance of memory for melodies: Articulation or attentional refreshing?

Past research on the effects of articulatory suppression on working memory for nonverbal sounds has been characterized by discrepant findings, which suggests that multiple mechanisms may be involved in the rehearsal of nonverbal sounds. In two experiments we examined the potential roles of two theoretical mechanisms of verbal working memory-articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing-in the maintenance of memory for short melodies. In both experiments, participants performed a same-different melody comparison task. During an 8-s retention interval, interference tasks were introduced to suppress articulatory rehearsal, attentional refreshing, or both. In Experiment 1, only the conditions that featured articulatory suppression resulted in worse memory performance than in a control condition, and the suppression of both attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal concurrently did not impair memory more than articulatory suppression alone. Experiment 2 reproduced these findings and also confirmed that the locus of interference was articulatory and not auditory (i.e., the interference was not attributable to the sound of participants' own voices during articulatory suppression). Both experiments suggested that articulatory rehearsal played a role in the maintenance of melodies in memory, whereas attentional refreshing did not. We discuss potential theoretical implications regarding the mechanisms used for the rehearsal of nonverbal sounds in working memory.

Have We Forgotten Auditory Sensory Memory? Retention Intervals in Studies of Nonverbal Auditory Working Memory.

Researchers have shown increased interest in mechanisms of working memory for nonverbal sounds such as music and environmental sounds. These studies often have used two-stimulus comparison tasks: two sounds separated by a brief retention interval (often 3-5 s) are compared, and a "same" or "different" judgment is recorded. Researchers seem to have assumed that sensory memory has a negligible impact on performance in auditory two-stimulus comparison tasks. This assumption is examined in detail in this comment. According to seminal texts and recent research reports, sensory memory persists in parallel with working memory for a period of time following hearing a stimulus and can influence behavioral responses on memory tasks. Unlike verbal working memory studies that use serial recall tasks, research paradigms for exploring nonverbal working memory-especially two-stimulus comparison tasks-may not be differentiating working memory from sensory memory processes in analyses of behavioral responses, because retention interval durations have not excluded the possibility that the sensory memory trace drives task performance. This conflation of different constructs may be one contributor to discrepant research findings and the resulting proliferation of theoretical conjectures regarding mechanisms of working memory for nonverbal sounds.

Speech Auditory Alerts Promote Memory for Alerted Events in a Video-Simulated Self-Driving Car Ride.

OBJECTIVE: Auditory displays could be essential to helping drivers maintain situation awareness in autonomous vehicles, but to date, few or no studies have examined the effectiveness of different types of auditory displays for this application scenario. BACKGROUND: Recent advances in the development of autonomous vehicles (i.e., self-driving cars) have suggested that widespread automation of driving may be tenable in the near future. Drivers may be required to monitor the status of automation programs and vehicle conditions as they engage in secondary leisure or work tasks (entertainment, communication, etc.) in autonomous vehicles. METHOD: An experiment compared memory for alerted events-a component of Level 1 situation awareness-using speech alerts, auditory icons, and a visual control condition during a video-simulated self-driving car ride with a visual secondary task. The alerts gave information about the vehicle's operating status and the driving scenario. RESULTS: Speech alerts resulted in better memory for alerted events. Both auditory display types resulted in less perceived effort devoted toward the study tasks but also greater perceived annoyance with the alerts. CONCLUSION: Speech auditory displays promoted Level 1 situation awareness during a simulation of a ride in a self-driving vehicle under routine conditions, but annoyance remains a concern with auditory displays. APPLICATION: Speech auditory displays showed promise as a means of increasing Level 1 situation awareness of routine scenarios during an autonomous vehicle ride with an unrelated secondary task.

A comparison of human versus virtual interruptions.

Although a wealth of research has examined the effects of virtual interruptions, human-initiated interruptions are common in many work settings. An experiment compared performance on a primary data-entry task during human-initiated (human) versus computer-initiated (virtual) interruptions. Participants completed blocks of trials that featured either an interruption from a computer or an interruption from a human experimenter. The timing of the onset of the interruptions was also varied across trials. Human interruptions resulted in much shorter interruption lags. No significant differences were observed for the number of correct responses on the primary task for human versus virtual interruptions, but interruptions that occurred later in the task sequence resulted in fewer mistakes. The social aspect of human interruptions may have attenuated interruption lags in that condition, and it is possible that virtual interruptions may permit people greater temporal flexibility in managing their engagement with interruptions.

Mental scanning of sonifications reveals flexible encoding of nonspeech sounds and a universal per-item scanning cost.

A mental scanning paradigm was used to examine the representation of nonspeech sounds in working memory. Participants encoded sonifications - nonspeech auditory representations of quantitative data - as either verbal lists, visuospatial images, or auditory images. The number of tones and overall frequency changes in the sonifications were also manipulated to allow for different hypothesized patterns of reaction times across encoding strategies. Mental scanning times revealed different patterns of reaction times across encoding strategies, despite the fact that all internal representations were constructed from the same nonspeech sound stimuli. Scanning times for the verbal encoding strategy increased linearly as the number of items in the verbal representation increased. Scanning times for the visuospatial encoding strategy were generally slower and increased as the metric distance (derived metaphorically from frequency change) in the mental image increased. Scanning times for the auditory imagery strategy were faster and closest to the veridical durations of the original stimuli. Interestingly, the number of items traversed in scanning a representation significantly affected scanning times across all encoding strategies. Results suggested that nonspeech sounds can be flexibly represented, and that a universal per-item scanning cost persisted across encoding strategies. Implications for cognitive theory, the mental scanning paradigm, and practical applications are discussed.

Personal narratives in schizophrenia: increases in coherence following 5 months of vocational rehabilitation.

Many researchers have hoped vocational rehabilitation might help people with schizophrenia not only to work but also to develop more coherent narratives of their abilities and the boundaries imposed by their condition. This study compared narrative accounts of persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (n = 16) generated using the Indiana Psychiatric Illness Interview prior to and 5 months following entry into a vocational rehabilitation program. Results revealed participants with more intact levels of neurocognitive function as assessed with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test demonstrated significant gains in narrative coherence relative to those with greater levels of deficit (F(1,14) = 6.3, p = .02).

Attributional style and symptoms as predictors of social function in schizophrenia.

While the attributions of people with schizophrenia have been hypothesized to play a role in determining social behavior, contradictory predictions can be made about exactly what type of attributions contribute to social dysfunction. One possibility is that attributing undesirable events to internal, stable, and global factors might lead to poorer social function. An alternate possibility is that attributing events in general to internal, stable, and global factors might lead to better social function. As a test of these hypotheses, 40 participants in a post-acute phase of schizophrenia were administered the Attributional Style Questionnaire, the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, and the Quality of Life Scale. Stepwise multiple regressions controlling for age and education indicated that a lack of negative symptoms and the tendency to make stable attributions for life events in general predicted more frequent social contacts, a higher quality of social interaction, and better community participation on the Quality of Life Scale. Results suggest that the tendency to see life events as the result of unstable or unpredictable causes is associated with social dysfunction independent of symptom level.

Hopelessness as a predictor of work functioning among patients with schizophrenia.

Although many persons with schizophrenia report significant levels of hopelessness, less is understood about the impact of hopelessness on functioning. This study examined the relationship between initial ratings of hopelessness and work functioning in the third week of a vocational rehabilitation program for 34 veterans with a diagnosis of a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. Pearson correlations revealed that poorer task performance was associated with perhaps unrealistic expectations of success, whereas poorer interpersonal functioning at work was associated with poorer motivation. The findings suggest that specific domains of hopelessness are associated with different aspects of work functioning.

Patterns of obsessive-compulsive symptoms and social function in schizophrenia.

Research has alternately found that obsessive and compulsive (OC) symptoms in schizophrenia are associated with graver and lesser levels of negative symptoms. One possible explanation is that there are two distinct groups of persons with OC symptoms: those with cognitive deficits and high levels of negative symptoms and those who generally function well and have low levels of negative symptoms. To examine this question, we performed a cluster analysis on 66 persons with schizophrenia spectrum disorders on the basis of their level of obsessive-compulsive phenomena and global psychosocial function. Four groups were found: high OC/good function (n=9), non-OC/poor function (n=25), non-OC/moderate function (n=20), and high OC/poor function (n=12). A MANCOVA controlling for age found significant group differences on assessments of negative symptoms, executive function and attention among groups. As predicted, the high OC/poor function group had significantly poorer attention than any other group and poorer executive function than either non-OC group. The high OC/good function had lower levels of negative symptoms than either non-OC group. Implications for research and rehabilitation are discussed.

Vocational function among persons with schizophrenia with and without history of childhood sexual trauma.

This study examined whether history of childhood sexual abuse in schizophrenia is linked with severity of vocational deficits. Work performance was measured using the Work Behavior Inventory and hours of work performed in a vocational rehabilitation program and then compared for 12 participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder reporting abuse and 18 with schizophrenia with no abuse history. ANOVAs indicated that the sexual abuse group worked fewer hours during the first 4 weeks of the program and demonstrated poorer work performance overall. An interaction was found suggesting that the sexually abused group's performance declined as the nonsexually abused group improved over time. Childhood sexual abuse may be associated with greater vocational deficits in adults with schizophrenia.

Neuroticism and visual memory impairments as predictors of the severity of delusions in schizophrenia.

This study examined whether levels of emotional distress and impairments in visual memory were uniquely associated with severity of delusions in schizophrenia. Severity of delusions was assessed using select items from the positive component of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale among 44 persons with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder in a post-acute phase of illness. Emotional distress was assessed using the neuroticism subscale of the NEO Five Factor Inventory, and visual memory was assessed using the Rey Complex Figure Test. Controlling for executive function, visual attention, and verbal memory, a multiple regression analysis revealed that visual memory and neuroticism were each significantly related to severity of delusions, with the two combined accounting for one quarter of the variance. These same variables were unrelated to negative and excitement symptoms. Severity of delusions is linked to both higher levels of neuroticism and greater impairment in visual memory.