Expert Drivers' Prospective Thinking-Aloud to Enhance Automated Driving Technologies - Investigating Uncertainty and Anticipation in Traffic.

Current automated driving technology cannot cope in numerous conditions that are basic daily driving situations for human drivers. Previous studies show that profound understanding of human drivers' capability to interpret and anticipate traffic situations is required in order to provide similar capacities for automated driving technologies. There is currently not enough a priori understanding of these anticipatory capacities for safe driving applicable to any given driving situation. To enable the development of safer, more economical, and more comfortable automated driving experience, expert drivers' anticipations and related uncertainties were studied on public roads. First, driving instructors' expertise in anticipating traffic situations was validated with a hazard prediction test. Then, selected driving instructors drove in real traffic while thinking aloud anticipations of unfolding events. The results indicate sources of uncertainty and related adaptive and social behaviors in specific traffic situations and environments. In addition, the applicability of these anticipatory capabilities to current automated driving technology is discussed. The presented method and results can be utilized to enhance automated driving technologies by indicating their potential limitations and may enable improved situation awareness for automated vehicles. Furthermore, the produced data can be utilized for recognizing such upcoming situations, in which the human should take over the vehicle, to enable timely take-over requests.

The impact of visual working memory capacity on the filtering efficiency of emotional face distractors.

Emotional faces can serve as distractors for visual working memory (VWM) tasks. An event-related potential called contralateral delay activity (CDA) can measure the filtering efficiency of face distractors. Previous studies have investigated the influence of VWM capacity on filtering efficiency of simple neutral distractors but not of face distractors. We measured the CDA indicative of emotional face filtering during a VWM task related to facial identity. VWM capacity was measured in a separate colour change detection task, and participants were divided to high- and low-capacity groups. The high-capacity group was able to filter out distractors similarly irrespective of its facial emotion. In contrast, the low-capacity group failed in filtering the neutral and angry face distractors, while the filtering was efficient for the happy face distractors. The results indicate that potentially threatening faces are particularly difficult to filter if VWM capacity is limited.

Effects of menu structure and touch screen scrolling style on the variability of glance durations during in-vehicle visual search tasks.

The effects of alternative navigation device display features on drivers' visual sampling efficiency while searching forpoints of interest were studied in two driving simulation experiments with 40 participants. Given that the number of display items was sufficient, display features that facilitate resumption of visual search following interruptions were expected to lead to more consistent in-vehicle glance durations. As predicted, compared with a grid-style menu, searching information in a list-style menu while driving led to smaller variance in durations of in-vehicle glances, in particular with nine item displays. Kinetic touch screen scrolling induced a greater number of very short in-vehicle glances than scrolling with arrow buttons. The touch screen functionality did not significantly diminish the negative effects of the grid-menu compared with physical controls with list-style menus. The findings suggest that resumability of self-paced, in-vehicle visual search tasks could be assessed with the measures of variance of in-vehicle glance duration distributions. Statement of Relevance: The reported research reveals display design factors affecting safety-relevant variability of in-vehicle glance durations and provides a theoretical framework for explaining the effects. The research can have a significant methodical value for driver distraction research and practical value for the design and testing of in-vehicle user interfaces.

Apperception in primed problem solving.

Mental representation is a central theoretical concept in modern cognitive psychology. However, its investigation has been predominantly based on inapt perceptualist concepts, which presume that information contents in them, i.e., mental contents, solely arise from stimulus. This is in spite of the evidence that much in human thought does not have any sensory equivalence. Consequently, we make a difference between perception and apperception, as e.g., Kant and Wundt did, and argue in favor of a detailed analysis of this mental process that is responsible for the construction of representations. We present here five primed problem solving experiments. The basic idea was to demonstrate that depending on priming information people represent perceptually identical stimuli very differently, i.e., they ascribe different uses and meanings to objects and they integrate them differently to compose distinct solutions. In this vein, we demonstrate that people regularly rely on information, which is not or cannot be perceived in principle. On the ground of our empirical findings, we resurrect the issue on why the difference between perception and apperception is theoretically adequate and introduce some central concepts for the theoretical analysis of apperception such as "seeing as" and functional binding.

Mental contents in transfer.

The purpose of this paper is to develop theoretical concepts for mental content-based investigations and explanations in the psychology of human thinking in general and transfer more specifically. The schema-based analysis of transfer postulates that the solving of an earlier problem can influence a person's future behavior only to the degree of schematic similarity between the primary and the secondary problem solution. The reported content-based investigation, using Duncker's (1935) classic tumor task, shows however, that the contents of schemata cause an essential variation in a person's mental representation and judgement of radiation confluence effects. The study identified and assessed in separate experiments the influence of three different thought models (additive, balancing, and distribution-based) and two distinct types of spatial images of rays (compact vs. diverging). Whereas differences in the central tendencies of the judgements could expose some of the priming effects between experimental conditions, the core of the content-based analysis was based on the identification of distinct groups of participants displaying a certain type of judgement. These differences reflected the contrasts between the thought models and the ray image content. They substantiated the claim that a schema-based analysis of transfer and reasoning in general, is alone not sufficient to explain interindividual and intercontextual differences that are based on distinctive mental content in the reasoners' apperception.

El ajedrez y la psicología del pensamiento orientada al contenido / Chess and content-oriented psychology of thinking

En este artículo presentamos un conjunto de principios que definen la psicología cognitiva orientada hacia el contenido. Estos principios se presentan en el contexto de la investigación realizada sobre la forma de procesamiento de los jugadores de ajedrez. En el artículo se defiende que los conceptos teóricos de atención, imagen mental y memoria están basados en los conceptos de capacidad y formato, y que éstos no son lo suficientemente poderosos para expresar los fenómenos asociados a los contenidos mentales. Por el contrario, es necesario desarrollar un lenguaje teórico que esté genuinamente orientado hacia el contenido para poder discutir, por ejemplo, los problemas de contenido y su integración en el pensamiento. El principal problema es cómo explicar los contenidos de las representaciones ¿Por qué tienen las representaciones los contenidos que tienen?.Aquí focalizaremos la discusión en la manera en que se puede explicar la selección de elementos contenidos en la representación. Para formular los conceptos básicos de la investigación sobre el pensamiento orientado hacia el contenido se han de discutir primero varios puntos. Primero, se mostrará que la investigación tradicional sobre atención y memoria está orientada hacia la capacidad y, por tanto, no es capaz de expresar los contenidos mentales. En segundo lugar, se defiende que hay fenómenos referidos al contenido que se tienen que explicar mediante otros fenómenos relacionados con el contenido. En tercer lugar, se muestra que en ajedrez, las personas integran la información en representaciones mentales a través de reglas funcionales o razones que especifican por qué algunos contenidos deben incluirse en la representación. Finalmente se muestra que las personas integran la información alrededor de "modelos de pensamiento" cuyos contenidos, junto a las reglas funcionales o razones, explican y clarifican la estructura de contenido de la representación mental. Se defiende también que el análisis del contenido es metacientíficamente más similar a la lingüística, con sus métodos básicos de explicación y analísis de contenidos, que a las ciencias naturales, que es el modelo que mas comúnmente subyace ala psicología experimental actual (AU)