Incorporating Situation Awareness Cues in Virtual Reality for Users in Dynamic in-Vehicle Environments.

The increasing ubiquity and mobility of virtual reality (VR) devices has introduced novel use cases, one of which is using VR in vehicles, both human-driven and fully automated. However, the effects of the adoption of VR-in-the-car on user task performance, safety, trust, and perceived risk are still largely unknown or not fully understood. Blocking out the physical world and substituting it with a virtual environment has many potential benefits including fewer distractions and greater productivity. However, one shortcoming of this seclusion is losing situation awareness which becomes critical in dynamic, in-vehicle environments, even when the user is not in the driver's seat. Hence, this study aims to understand the effects of providing VR users with situation awareness cues about the real world, when riding in a human-driven or a fully automated car. The results of this driving simulator experiment provide valuable insights into passengers' experience and their information needs while immersed in VR environments. Identifying passengers' unique challenges and needs, as well as developing solutions for them, is expected to improve users' travel experience towards a wider adoption of VR devices.

Interactions between spontaneous instantiations to the basic level and post-event suggestions.

Extensive research shows that post-event suggestions can distort the memory for a target event. In this study we examined the effect of such suggestions as they interact with the products of a spontaneous memory process: instantiation of abstract information to an intermediate level of abstractness, the basic level (Pansky & Koriat, 2004 ). Participants read a narrative containing items presented at the superordinate level (e.g., FRUIT), were exposed to suggestions that referred to these items at the basic level (e.g., APPLE), and were finally asked to recall the original items. We found that the tendency to instantiate spontaneously in the control (non-misleading) condition, particularly over time, increased following exposure to suggestions that were likely to coincide with those instantiations. Exposure to such suggestions, either immediately or following a 24-hour delay, reduced subsequent correct recall of the original items only if the suggested information coincided with the information one tends to instantiate spontaneously in a given context. Suggestibility, in this case, was particularly pronounced and phenomenologically compelling in terms of remember/know judgements. The findings are taken to imply that effects of post-event suggestions can be understood in terms of the constructive processes that set the stage for their occurrence.

Inoculating against eyewitness suggestibility via interpolated verbatim vs. gist testing.

In real-life situations, eyewitnesses often have control over the level of generality in which they choose to report event information. In the present study, we adopted an early-intervention approach to investigate to what extent eyewitness memory may be inoculated against suggestibility, following two different levels of interpolated reporting: verbatim and gist. After viewing a target event, participants responded to interpolated questions that required reporting of target details at either the verbatim or the gist level. After 48 hr, both groups of participants were misled about half of the target details and were finally tested for verbatim memory of all the details. The findings were consistent with our predictions: Whereas verbatim testing was successful in completely inoculating against suggestibility, gist testing did not reduce it whatsoever. These findings are particularly interesting in light of the comparable testing effects found for these two modes of interpolated testing.