Personalizing automated driving speed to enhance user experience and performance in intermediate-level automated driving.

In the context of high-level driving automation (SAE levels 4-5), several studies have shown that a personalized automated driving style, i.e., mimicking that of the human behind the wheel, can improve his experience. The objective of this simulator study was to examine the potential transfer of these benefits in the context of intermediate-level driving automation (SAE levels 2-3), focusing on driving speed personalization. In the first phase of the study, the driving speed of 52 participants was recorded. In the second phase, the same participants were driven by an automated car on a highway twice, and sometimes had to takeover during the drive because of a stationary vehicle on the lane. On these two drives, the automated car drove either at the same speed as them (personalized) or 20 km/h faster. The results showed that using a personalized speed driving style led to higher comfort, and that this effect was fully mediated by automated driving perceived safety. Although driving speed predicted automated driving perceived safety, this effect was actually moderated by trust in automated cars. Regarding takeover performance, the results showed that the brake use and maximum force were lower with the personalized speed driving style, leading to lower resulting maximum negative longitudinal acceleration and speed variability. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the benefits of automated driving style personalization in terms of speed extend to SAE levels 2-3. In addition to the experience benefits, this personalization approach could also improve traffic flow and safety.

Gambling and Aging: An Overview of a Risky Behavior.

Gambling is a field of study that has grown since the 2000s. Much research has focused on adolescents and youth as a vulnerable population. The rate of aging gamblers is increasing; however, evidence-based knowledge of this population is still too sparse. After introducing the issue (1), this article provides a narrative review of older adults' gambling through three sections: (2) older adult gamblers (age, characteristics, and motivations), (3) gambling as a risky decision-making situation, and (4) gambling disorder related to older adults. By drawing on the existing literature from a problematization perspective, this type of review can highlight complex and original research topics and provoke thought and controversy to generate avenues for future research. This narrative review provides an overview of the existing literature on gambling among older adults and offers perspectives on how aging can affect decision-making and thus gambling for this population. Older adults are a specific population, not only in terms of the consequences of gambling disorders but also in terms of the motivations and cognitions underlying gambling behaviors. Studies on behavioral science focusing on decision-making in older adults could help in the development of public policy in terms of targeted prevention.

Multimodal interface and reliability displays: Effect on attention, mode awareness, and trust in partially automated vehicles.

The goal of this study is to evaluate the effect of a multimodal interface indicating the limits of automation in order to stimulate an appropriate level of attention and to induce accurate mode awareness and trust in partial driving automation. Participants drove in a driving simulator with partial driving automation and were confronted with surprising situations of suspension of driving automation systems in different contexts. They drove the simulator during three driving sessions, with either a multimodal interface indicating the limits of automation or a visual basic interface. Their driving performance, ocular behavior, and subjective evaluation of trust and workload were evaluated. The results revealed that the multimodal interface stimulates an appropriate level of attention and increases mode awareness and trust in automation, but these effects are context-dependent. The indications of the limits of automation improved the knowledge regarding automation, but this knowledge did not necessarily lead to improved driving performance. Design solutions are discussed to support the improvement of driving performance for take-overs in vehicles equipped with partial driving automation.

Influence of Emotions on Elementary-School Children's Implicit Learning during a Serial Reaction Time Task.

As pedagogues and childhood professionals, teachers must be aware of both implicit and explicit learning processes. They must also bear in mind that learners' performances may be influenced by the many emotions triggered by different situations at school (e.g., fear of failing, happiness upon succeeding, anger at leaving work unfinished). The objective of the present study was thus to analyze the efficiency of implicit learning among 8- to 11-year-old children and the impact of emotions on this type of learning. In order to analyze implicit learning, 65 elementary-school children performed a serial reaction time task in a laboratory context. Emotions were induced by asking the children to read six short emotional sentences and listen to classical music. Results showed a significant impact of the task condition (semi-random or fixed sequence) on reaction times. Moreover, the induction of happiness resulted in slightly longer reaction times compared with neutral induction. These results need to be deepened to better understand the interactions between emotions and implicit learning in children.

Should my automated car drive as I do? Investigating speed preferences of drivengers in various driving conditions.

Studies investigating the question of how automated cars (ACs) should drive converge to show that a personalized automated driving-style, i.e., mimicking the driving-style of the human behind the wheel, has a positive influence on various aspects of his experience (e.g., comfort). However, few studies have investigated the fact that these benefits might vary with respect to driver-related variables, such as trust in ACs, and contextual variables of the driving activity, such as weather conditions. Additionally, the context of intermediate levels of automation, such as SAE level 3, remains largely unexplored. The objective of this study was to investigate these points. In a scenario-based experimental protocol, participants were exposed to written scenarios in which a character is driven by a SAE level 3 AC in different combinations of conditions (i.e., types of roads, weather conditions and traffic congestion levels). For each condition, participants were asked to indicate how fast they would prefer their AC to drive and how fast they would manually drive in the same situation. Through analyses of variance and equivalence tests, results showed a tendency for participants to overall prefer a slightly lower AC speed than their own. However, a linear regression analysis showed that while participants with the lowest levels of trust preferred an AC speed lower than theirs, those with the highest levels preferred an AC speed nearly identical to theirs. Overall, the results of this study suggest that it would be more beneficial to implement a personalization approach for the design of automated driving-styles rather than a one for all approach.

Coworking spaces vs. home: Does employees' experience of the negative aspects of working from home predict their intention to telework in a coworking space?

In this study, we investigated the determinants of employees' intention to telework in a coworking space, with the assumption that employees' experience with the negative aspects of teleworking from home would impact their intention to telework in a coworking space in the future. A sample of 268 French teleworkers answered an online questionnaire measuring their experience of several negative aspects of teleworking from home (e.g., perceived social isolation), and their opinion toward teleworking in a coworking space (perceived usefulness, perceived feasibility, attitude and behavioral intention). Results indicate that perceived social isolation and perceived lack of working comfort when working from home directly impacted how useful participants perceived teleworking in a coworking space to be, and indirectly their intention to telework in a coworking space in the future. Budget, management agreement and job compatibility were, however, identified as factors mitigating participants' intention to telework in a coworking space, even if perceived as potentially beneficial.

Crossing the street in front of an autonomous vehicle: An investigation of eye contact between drivengers and vulnerable road users.

Communication between road users is a major key to coordinate movement and increase roadway safety. The aim of this work was to grasp how pedestrians (Experiment A), cyclists (Experiment B), and kick scooter users (Experiment C) sought to visually communicate with drivengers when they would face autonomous vehicles (AVs). In each experiment, participants (n = 462, n = 279, and n = 202, respectively) were asked to imagine themselves in described situations of encounters between a specific type of vulnerable road user (e.g., pedestrian) and a human driver in an approaching car. The human driver state and the communicative means of the approaching car through an external Human-Machine Interface (eHMI) were manipulated between the scenarios. The participants were prompted to rate from "never" to "always" (6-point Likert scale) the frequency with which they would seek eye contact with the human driver either in order to express their willingness to cross or to make their effective decision to cross. Our findings revealed that a passive human driver in an AV with no visual checking on the road triggered a decline in vulnerable road users' desire to communicate by eye contact (Experiments A-C). Moreover, the results of Experiment C demonstrated that the speed screen, the text message screen, and the vibrating mobile app eHMI signals diminished kick scooter users' desire to communicate visually with the human driver, with some age-based differences. This suggested a better comprehension of the approaching car's intentions by the kick scooter users, driven by the features of the eHMI.

Searching in clutter: Visual behavior and performance of expert action video game players.

Searching for targets among distractors in visual scenes can be more difficult due to the presence of clutter. However, studies in various domains have shown differentiated effects according to the expertise of the searcher. The present study extended these findings to the domain of action video games expertise. 58 participants, split in 2 groups (action video game players and non-action video game players) searched for targets in visual scenes under two clutter conditions (uncluttered and high clutter). Reaction times and accuracy served as measures of performance, and the visual behavior was assessed using the number and duration of eye fixations. Our findings suggest that visual clutter has a negative influence on performance and alters the visual behavior during visual search in action video game scenes. Our results also suggest that expert action video game players might use different visual strategies to cope with clutter, leading however to no performance benefits.

Context-specific proportion congruent effects: Compound-cue contingency learning in disguise.

Conflict between task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimulus information leads to impairment in response speed and accuracy. For instance, in the colour-word Stroop paradigm, participants respond slower and less accurately to the print colour of incongruent colour words (e.g., "red" printed in green) than to congruent colour words (e.g., "green" in green). Importantly, this congruency effect is diminished when the trials in an experiment are mostly incongruent, relative to mostly congruent, termed a proportion congruent effect. When distracting stimuli are mostly congruent in one context (e.g., location or font) but mostly incongruent in another context (e.g., another location or font), the congruency effect is still diminished in the mostly incongruent context, termed a context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effect. Both the standard proportion congruent and CSPC effects are typically interpreted in terms of conflict-driven attentional control, frequently termed conflict adaptation or conflict monitoring. However, in two experiments, we investigated contingency learning confounds in context-specific proportion congruent effects. In particular, two variants of a dissociation procedure are presented with the font variant of the CSPC procedure. In both, robust contingency learning effects were observed. No evidence for context-specific control was observed. In fact, results trended in the wrong direction. In all, the results suggest that CSPC effects may not be a useful way of studying attentional control.

Mood Self-Assessment in Children From the Age of 7.

The evaluation of emotions is one of the main challenges facing theorists and applied psychology researchers. In children, in order to focus on subjective feelings, psychologists mainly use non-verbal scales that measure both the intensity and valence of the emotions felt. The use of these scales poses a main research questions: What is the children's knowledge of the emotion presented? In order to properly assess the emotional state of a child, it is first necessary to measure the child's understanding of the major characteristics of emotion. Secondly, it is important to assess the child's ability to designate the primary emotion associated with a particular situation, and assess how these emotional situations alters their own assessment of their emotional state. This research aims to know if children from the age of seven to eleven can be emotionally induced and if this induction varies in the lifespan.

Cognitive Characteristics of Strategic and Non-strategic Gamblers.

Participation in strategic and non-strategic games is mostly explained in the literature by gender: men gamble on strategic games, while women gamble on non-strategic games. However, little is known about the underlying cognitive factors that could also distinguish strategic and non-strategic gamblers. We suggest that cognitive style and need for cognition also explain participation in gambling subtypes. From a dual-process perspective, cognitive style is the tendency to reject or accept the fast, automatic answer that comes immediately in response to a problem. Individuals that preferentially reject the automatic response use an analytic style, which suggest processing information in a slow way, with deep treatment. The intuitive style supposes a reliance on fast, automatic answers. The need for cognition provides a motivation to engage in effortful activities. One hundred and forty-nine gamblers (53 strategic and 96 non-strategic) answered the Cognitive Reflection Test, Need For Cognition Scale, and socio-demographic questions. A logistic regression was conducted to evaluate the influence of gender, cognitive style and need for cognition on participation in strategic and non-strategic games. Our results show that a model with both gender and cognitive variables is more accurate than a model with gender alone. Analytic (vs. intuitive) style, high (vs. low) need for cognition and being male (vs. female) are characteristics of strategic gamblers (vs. non-strategic gamblers). This study highlights the importance of considering the cognitive characteristics of strategic and non-strategic gamblers in order to develop preventive campaigns and treatments that fit the best profiles for gamblers.

Sonification of in-vehicle interface reduces gaze movements under dual-task condition.

In-car infotainment systems (ICIS) often degrade driving performances since they divert the driver's gaze from the driving scene. Sonification of hierarchical menus (such as those found in most ICIS) is examined in this paper as one possible solution to reduce gaze movements towards the visual display. In a dual-task experiment in the laboratory, 46 participants were requested to prioritize a primary task (a continuous target detection task) and to simultaneously navigate in a realistic mock-up of an ICIS, either sonified or not. Results indicated that sonification significantly increased the time spent looking at the primary task, and significantly decreased the number and the duration of gaze saccades towards the ICIS. In other words, the sonified ICIS could be used nearly exclusively by ear. On the other hand, the reaction times in the primary task were increased in both silent and sonified conditions. This study suggests that sonification of secondary tasks while driving could improve the driver's visual attention of the driving scene.

The restless mind while driving: drivers' thoughts behind the wheel.

UNLABELLED: Recent research has clearly shown that inattention when driving has an indisputable impact on road safety. "Mind wandering" (MW), an inattentional state caused by a shift in attention from the ongoing task to inner thoughts, is not only frequent in everyday activities but also known to impact performance. There is a growing body of research investigating the concept of MW, suggesting potential causes that could foster such a phenomenon. Only one epidemiological study has focused on this issue in a critical driving context (Galéra et al., 2012), and it revealed the harmful effects of MW in increasing the risk of a car crash. Experimental studies rather consider that driver would adduce in MW (Lemercier et al., 2014). When the driving context is too hard or the thought too difficult to proceed, driver reduced their MW. The aim of this paper is to examine this issue using the most recent trip of ordinary drivers whose MW state did not lead to a road accident. Using a questionnaire, information was collected about the participants' most recent trip as a driver, including: (1) personal characteristics, (2) context in which MW occurs, (3) awareness of MW episodes and finally (4) characteristics of the thoughts. RESULTS: revealed that MW affected 85.2% of the drivers, who spent on average 34.74% of their trip in a MW state. Moreover, we found that the contexts which favor MW are situations in which less of the driver's attention is needed to drive, such as familiar commutes, monotonous motorways or by-passes, or when drivers were alone in their cars. In these MW situations, the drivers quickly became aware of their MW episodes. Thoughts tend to involve neutral private concerns, related to present- or future-oriented content. Our findings suggest that MW is a functional state aiming to solve current problems. Future investigations should focus on this critical concept of MW when driving, both to identify safety issues and to provide suitable solutions for drivers subject to a wandering mind.

Context-specific temporal learning with non-conflict stimuli: proof-of-principle for a learning account of context-specific proportion congruent effects.

The conflict adaptation account proposes that participants adjust attention to target and distracting stimuli in response to conflict. This is argued to explain the proportion congruent effect, wherein the congruency effect decreases as the proportion of conflicting incongruent trials increases. Some reports further argue that this conflict adaptation process can be context-specific. This paper presents a proof-of-principle for a competing account. It is suggested that such context-specific effects might be driven by very basic temporal learning processes. In the reported experiment, we manipulated stimulus contrast in place of congruency. In one location, stimulus letters were mostly easy to identify (high stimulus contrast). In the other location, letters were mostly hard to identify (low stimulus contrast). Participants produced a larger contrast effect in the mostly easy context. Along with supplemental analyses investigating the role of context switching and previous trial response times, the results are consistent with the notion that different rhythms of responding are learned for an easy versus hard location context. These results suggest that context-specific proportion congruency effects might result, in whole or in part, from temporal learning. Conflict adaptation may or may not play an additional role.

Distraction and driving: results from a case-control responsibility study of traffic crash injured drivers interviewed at the emergency room.

BACKGROUND: Use of cellular phones has been shown to be associated with crashes but many external distractions remain to be studied. OBJECTIVE: To assess the risk associated with diversion of attention due to unexpected events or secondary tasks at the wheel. DESIGN: Responsibility case-control study. SETTING: Adult emergency department of the Bordeaux University Hospital (France) from April 2010 to August 2011. PARTICIPANTS: 955 injured drivers presenting as a result of motor vehicle crash. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The main outcome variable was responsibility for the crash. Exposures were external distraction, alcohol use, psychotropic medicine use, and sleep deprivation. Potential confounders were sociodemographic and crash characteristics. RESULTS: Beyond classical risk factor found to be associated with responsibility, results showed that distracting events inside the vehicle (picking up an object), distraction due to driver activity (smoking) and distracting events occurring outside were associated with an increased probability of being at fault. These distraction-related factors accounted for 8% of injurious road crashes. LIMITATIONS: Retrospective responsibility self-assessment. CONCLUSIONS: Diverted attention may carry more risk than expected. Our results are supporting recent research efforts to detect periods of driving vulnerability related to inattention.

Mind wandering and driving: responsibility case-control study.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the association between mind wandering (thinking unrelated to the task at hand) and the risk of being responsible for a motor vehicle crash. DESIGN: Responsibility case-control study. SETTING: Adult emergency department of a university hospital in France, April 2010 to August 2011. PARTICIPANTS: 955 drivers injured in a motor vehicle crash. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Responsibility for the crash, mind wandering, external distraction, negative affect, alcohol use, psychotropic drug use, and sleep deprivation. Potential confounders were sociodemographic and crash characteristics. RESULTS: Intense mind wandering (highly disrupting/distracting content) was associated with responsibility for a traffic crash (17% (78 of 453 crashes in which the driver was thought to be responsible) v 9% (43 of 502 crashes in which the driver was not thought to be responsible); adjusted odds ratio 2.12, 95% confidence interval 1.37 to 3.28). CONCLUSIONS: Mind wandering while driving, by decoupling attention from visual and auditory perceptions, can jeopardise the ability of the driver to incorporate information from the environment, thereby threatening safety on the roads.

Incidental learning of incongruent items in a manual version of the Stroop task.

Two experiments refine the incidental learning hypothesis of incongruent items during color-naming. In Exp. 1, the size of the incongruent item set was manipulated in a manual Stroop task. In Version 4, four different incongruent items were presented; in Version 8, eight different incongruent items were presented; and in Version 12, 12 different incongruent items were presented. Analysis showed color-naming response time was roughly equivalent for neutral and incongruent items in Version 4. Conversely, the Stroop effect not only was manifest but also was equivalent in Versions 8 and 12. In Exp. 2, the role of the phonological loop in the Stroop effect was investigated using Version 4 of Exp. 1. The Experimental group repeated aloud the syllable "LA" during the Incongruent color-naming condition. Articulatory suppression resulted in a significant increase in Incongruent color-naming response time. Implications for the interpretation of Stroop data are discussed.

Knowing which day of the week it is: temporal structure and dynamics of memory.

The complementary role of static and dynamic information used when one needs to be located in time was studied. Static information refers to temporal knowledge about days of the week, and dynamic information reflects a sense of time, taking into account the present, the near past, and the future. Each day of an actual 7-day wk., 699 women and 620 men were asked to provide a "right" or "wrong" response to a statement such as "Today is X," where X was the name of one of the seven days of the week. Analysis suggested use of a structured temporal representation of the week: the weekend, a landmark, had an anchoring role. Also the dynamics of the content of working memory were indicated. The active "temporal window" participants hold in mind seems directed more towards the future than the past. Results are discussed within the more general context of time management.