Novice driver crashes: The relation between putative causal factors, countermeasures, real world implementations, and policy - A case study in simple, scalable solutions.

Novice drivers are at a greatly inflated risk of crashing. This led in the 20th century to numerous attempts to develop training programs that could reduce their crash risk. Yet, none proved effective. Novice drivers were largely considered careless, not clueless. This article is a case study in the United States of how a better understanding of the causes of novice driver crashes led to training countermeasures targeting teen driving behaviors with known associations with crashes. These effects on behaviors were large enough and long-lasting enough to convince insurance companies to develop training programs that they offered around the country to teen drivers. The success of the training programs at reducing the frequency of behaviors linked to crashes also led to several large-scale evaluations of the effect of the training programs on actual crashes. A reduction in crashes was observed. The cumulative effect has now led to state driver licensing agencies considering as a matter of policy both to include items testing the behaviors linked to crashes on licensing exams and to require training on safety critical behaviors. The effort has been ongoing for over a quarter century and is continuing. The case study highlights the critical elements that made it possible to move from a paradigm shift in the understanding of crash causes to the development and evaluation of crash countermeasures, to the implementation of those crash countermeasures, and to subsequent policy changes at the state and federal level. Key among these elements is the development of simple, scalable solutions.

Post Take-Over Performance Varies in Drivers of Automated and Connected Vehicle Technology in Near-Miss Scenarios.

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the impact of monitoring instructions when using an automated driving system (ADS) and road obstructions on post take-over performance in near-miss scenarios. BACKGROUND: Past research indicates partial ADS reduces the driver's situation awareness and degrades post take-over performance. Connected vehicle technology may alert drivers to impending hazards in time to safely avoid near-miss events. METHOD: Forty-eight licensed drivers using ADS were randomly assigned to either the active driving or passive driving condition. Participants navigated eight scenarios with or without a visual obstruction in a distributed driving simulator. The experimenter drove the other simulated vehicle to manually cause near-miss events. Participants' mean longitudinal velocity, standard deviation of longitudinal velocity, and mean longitudinal acceleration were measured. RESULTS: Participants in passive ADS group showed greater, and more variable, deceleration rates than those in the active ADS group. Despite a reliable audiovisual warning, participants failed to slow down in the red-light running scenario when the conflict vehicle was occluded. Participant's trust in the automated driving system did not vary between the beginning and end of the experiment. CONCLUSION: Drivers interacting with ADS in a passive manner may continue to show increased and more variable deceleration rates in near-miss scenarios even with reliable connected vehicle technology. Future research may focus on interactive effects of automated and connected driving technologies on drivers' ability to anticipate and safely navigate near-miss scenarios. APPLICATION: Designers of automated and connected vehicle technologies may consider different timing and types of cues to inform the drivers of imminent hazard in high-risk scenarios for near-miss events.

Psychometric curves reveal changes in bias, lapse rate, and guess rate in an online vigilance task.

When human monitors are required to detect infrequent signals among noise, they typically exhibit a decline in correct detections over time. Researchers have attributed this vigilance decrement to three alternative mechanisms: shifts in response bias, losses of sensitivity, and attentional lapses. The current study examined the extent to which changes in these mechanisms contributed to the vigilance decrement in an online monitoring task. Participants in two experiments (N = 102, N = 192) completed an online signal detection task, judging whether the separation between two probes each trial exceeded a criterion value. Separation was varied across trials and data were fit with logistic psychometric curves using Bayesian hierarchical parameter estimation. Parameters representing sensitivity, response bias, attentional lapse rate, and guess rate were compared across the first and last 4 minutes of the vigil. Data gave decisive evidence of conservative bias shifts, an increased attentional lapse rate, and a decreased positive guess rate over time on task, but no strong evidence for or against an effect of sensitivity. Sensitivity decrements appear less robust than criterion shifts or attention lapses as causes of the vigilance loss.

Booster Dose of Attention Training Program for Young Novice Drivers: A Longitudinal Driving Simulator Evaluation Study.

OBJECTIVE: We examined the effectiveness of a second exposure to ACCEL, a novel driving training program, on latent hazard anticipation (HA) performance several months after their first exposure. BACKGROUND: Past research has demonstrated that PC-based driver training programs can improve latent HA performance in young novice drivers, but these improvements are below the ceiling level. METHOD: Twenty-five participants were randomly assigned to either the Placebo group, the ACCEL-1 group, or the ACCEL-2 group. Following the completion of the assigned training program, participants drove a series of eighteen scenarios incorporating latent hazards in a high-fidelity driving simulator with their eyes tracked. Participants returned two to six months following the first session and completed either the placebo program (ACCEL-1 and Placebo groups), or a second dose of training program (ACCEL-2 group), again followed by simulated evaluation drives. RESULTS: The ACCEL-2 group showed improved HA performance compared to the ACCEL-1 and Placebo groups in the second evaluation. CONCLUSION: ACCEL enhances young novice drivers' latent HA performance. The effectiveness of ACCEL is retained up to 6 months, and a second dose further improves HA performance. APPLICATION: Policy makers should consider requiring such training before the completion of graduate driver license programs. Young novice drivers that do not show successful latent HA performance could be required to complete additional training before being allowed to drive without restrictions.

Does automation trust evolve from a leap of faith? An analysis using a reprogrammed pasteurizer simulation task.

Trust is a critical factor that drives successful human-automation interaction in a myriad of modern professional environments. One seminal work on human-automation trust is Muir and Moray (1996) showing that human-machine trust evolves from faith, then dependability, and finally predictability in a simulated supervisory control task. However, our recent work failed to replicate the finding of the original study, calling for further replication efforts. Experiment 1 aimed to fully replicate Muir and Moray (1996) where participants performed a simulated pasteurizer task. Experiment 2 attempted to replicate Experiment 1 using participants who major in Engineering as used in the original study. Both experiments showed that dependability was the best initial predictor of trust, building later to predictability and faith. Two experiments consistently failed to support both the hypothesis proposed by Muir and Moray (1996), that trust develops from predictability to dependability to faith, and their original findings that trust develops initially from faith. The results of the current experiments challenge this widely cited view of how human-machine trust develops. Modern automation designers should be aware that dependability might control initial trust development for general users and incorporate dependability information into their designs.

Minding the Gap: Effects of an Attention Maintenance Training Program on Driver Calibration.

OBJECTIVE: The present study examines the effect of an existing driver training program, FOrward Concentration and Attention Learning (FOCAL) on young drivers' calibration, drivers' ability to estimate the length of their in-vehicle glances while driving, using two different measures, normalized difference scores and Brier Scores. BACKGROUND: Young drivers are poor at maintaining attention to the forward roadway while driving a vehicle. Additionally, drivers may overestimate their attention maintenance abilities. Driver training programs such as FOCAL may train target skills such as attention maintenance but also might serve as a promising way to reduce errors in drivers' calibration of their self-perceived attention maintenance behaviors in comparison to their actual performance. METHOD: Thirty-six participants completed either FOCAL or a Placebo training program, immediately followed by driving simulator evaluations of their attention maintenance performance. In the evaluation drive, participants navigated four driving simulator scenarios during which their eyes were tracked. In each scenario, participants performed a map task on a tablet simulating an in-vehicle infotainment system. RESULTS: FOCAL-trained drivers maintained their attention to the forward roadway more and reported better calibration using the normalized difference measure than Placebo-trained drivers. However, the Brier scores did not distinguish the two groups on their calibration. CONCLUSION: The study implies that FOCAL has the potential to improve not only attention maintenance skills but also calibration of the skills for young drivers. APPLICATION: Driver training programs may be designed to train not only targeted higher cognitive skills but also driver calibration-both critical for driving safety in young drivers.

Psychometric Curves Reveal Three Mechanisms of Vigilance Decrement.

The vigilance decrement is a decline in signal detection rate that occurs over time on a sustained-attention task. The effect has typically been ascribed to conservative shifts of response bias and losses of perceptual sensitivity. Recent work, though, has suggested that sensitivity losses in vigilance tasks are spurious, and other findings have implied that attentional lapses contribute to vigilance failures. To test these possibilities, we used Bayesian hierarchical modeling to compare psychometric curves for the first and last blocks of a visual vigilance task. Participants were a convenience sample of 99 young adults. Data showed evidence for all three postulated mechanisms of vigilance loss: a conservative shift of response bias, a decrease in perceptual sensitivity, and a tendency toward more frequent attentional lapses. Results confirm that sensitivity losses are possible in a sustained-attention task but indicate that mental lapses can also contribute to the vigilance decrement.

Revisiting human-machine trust: a replication study of Muir and Moray (1996) using a simulated pasteurizer plant task.

This study aimed to replicate Muir and Moray that demonstrated operators' trust in automated machines developing from faith, then dependability, and lastly predictability. Following the procedure of Muir and Moray, we asked undergraduate participants to complete a training program in a simulated pasteuriser plant and an experimental program including various errors in the pasteuriser. Results showed that the best predictor of overall trust was not faith but dependability, and that dependability consistently governed trust throughout the interaction with the pasteuriser. Thus, the obtained data patterns were inconsistent with those reported in Muir and Moray. We observed that operators in the current study used automatic control more frequently than manual control to successfully produce performance scores contrary to the operators in Muir and Moray. The results imply that dependability is a critical predictor of human-machine trust, which automation designer may focus on. More extensive future research using more modern automated technologies is necessary for understanding what factors control human-autonomy trust in modern ages. Practitioner Summary: The results suggest that dependability is a key factor that shapes human-machine trust across the time course of the trust development. This replication study suggests a new perspective for designing effective human-machine systems for untrained users who do not go through extensive training programs on automated systems.

Human-Automation Trust to Technologies for Naïve Users Amidst and Following the COVID-19 Pandemic.

OBJECTIVE AND BACKGROUND: Trust is a critical factor that influences the success or failure of human-automation interaction in a variety of professional domains such as transportation, military, and healthcare. The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis will likely accelerate the implementation of automation and create unique problems involving human-automation trust for naïve users of automated technologies in the future. METHOD: We briefly review factors that can influence the development of human-automation trust amidst and following the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on two theories on human-automation trust and how naïve users develop and maintain their trust in unfamiliar technologies. RESULTS: The current review identifies user workload and perceived risk as critical factors that will impact human-automation trust during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both theories predict that it is important for naïve users to accumulate and analyze behavioral evidence of automated technologies to maintain appropriate trust levels as the pandemic progresses. CONCLUSION AND APPLICATION: Theories of human-automation trust inform trajectories of trust development toward unfamiliar technologies for naïve users. In application, manufacturers and distributers should focus on communicating system information effectively to retain users who may be "forced" to use unfamiliar technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Estimating Cognitive Workload in an Interactive Virtual Reality Environment Using EEG.

With the recent surge of affordable, high-performance virtual reality (VR) headsets, there is unlimited potential for applications ranging from education, to training, to entertainment, to fitness and beyond. As these interfaces continue to evolve, passive user-state monitoring can play a key role in expanding the immersive VR experience, and tracking activity for user well-being. By recording physiological signals such as the electroencephalogram (EEG) during use of a VR device, the user's interactions in the virtual environment could be adapted in real-time based on the user's cognitive state. Current VR headsets provide a logical, convenient, and unobtrusive framework for mounting EEG sensors. The present study evaluates the feasibility of passively monitoring cognitive workload via EEG while performing a classical n-back task in an interactive VR environment. Data were collected from 15 participants and the spatio-spectral EEG features were analyzed with respect to task performance. The results indicate that scalp measurements of electrical activity can effectively discriminate three workload levels, even after suppression of a co-varying high-frequency activity.

Automation trust and attention allocation in multitasking workspace.

Previous research suggests that operators with high workload can distrust and then poorly monitor automation, which has been generally inferred from automation dependence behaviors. To test automation monitoring more directly, the current study measured operators' visual attention allocation, workload, and trust toward imperfect automation in a dynamic multitasking environment. Participants concurrently performed a manual tracking task with two levels of difficulty and a system monitoring task assisted by an unreliable signaling system. Eye movement data indicate that operators allocate less visual attention to monitor automation when the tracking task is more difficult. Participants reported reduced levels of trust toward the signaling system when the tracking task demanded more focused visual attention. Analyses revealed that trust mediated the relationship between the load of the tracking task and attention allocation in Experiment 1, an effect that was not replicated in Experiment 2. Results imply a complex process underlying task load, visual attention allocation, and automation trust during multitasking. Automation designers should consider operators' task load in multitasking workspaces to avoid reduced automation monitoring and distrust toward imperfect signaling systems.

Effects of Task Difficulty and Display Format on Automation Usage Strategy: A Workload Capacity Analysis.

Objective An experiment used workload capacity analysis to quantify automation usage strategy across different task difficulty and display format types in a speeded task. Background Workload capacity measures the efficiency of concurrent information processing and can serve as a gauge of automation usage strategy in speeded decision tasks. The present study used workload capacity analysis to investigate automation usage strategy while information display format and task difficulty were manipulated. Method Subjects performed a speeded judgment task assisted by an automated aid that issued decision cues at varying onset times. Response time distributions were converted to measures of workload capacity. Results Two variants of a workload capacity measure, CzOR and CzAND, gave evidence that operators moderated their own decision times both in anticipation of and following the arrival of the aid's diagnosis under difficult task conditions regardless of display format. Conclusion Assistance from an automated decision aid may cause operators to delay their own responses in a speeded decision task, producing joint response time distributions that are slower than optimal. Application Even when it renders its own judgments quickly and with high accuracy, an automated decision aid may slow responses from a user. Automation designers should consider the relative costs and benefits of response accuracy and time when choosing whether and how to implement an automated decision aid.

Transient Signals and Inattentional Blindness in a Multi-object Tracking Task.

Inattentional blindness is a failure to notice an unexpected event when attention is directed elsewhere. The current study examined participants' awareness of an unexpected object that maintained luminance contrast, switched the luminance once, or repetitively flashed. One hundred twenty participants performed a dynamic tracking task on a computer monitor for which they were instructed to count the number of movement deflections of an attended set of objects while ignoring other objects. On the critical trial, an unexpected cross that did not change its luminance (control condition), switched its luminance once (switch condition), or repetitively flashed (flash condition) traveled across the stimulus display. Participants noticed the unexpected cross more frequently when the luminance feature matched their attention set than when it did not match. Unexpectedly, however, a proportion of the participants who noticed the cross in the switch and flash conditions were statistically comparable. The results suggest that an unexpected object with even a single luminance change can break inattentional blindness in a multi-object tracking task.

Trust and the Compliance-Reliance Paradigm: The Effects of Risk, Error Bias, and Reliability on Trust and Dependence.

OBJECTIVE: This study provides a theoretical link between trust and the compliance-reliance paradigm. We propose that for trust mediation to occur, the operator must be presented with a salient choice, and there must be an element of risk for dependence. BACKGROUND: Research suggests that false alarms and misses affect dependence via two independent processes, hypothesized as trust in signals and trust in nonsignals. These two trust types manifest in categorically different behaviors: compliance and reliance. METHOD: Eighty-eight participants completed a primary flight task and a secondary signaling system task. Participants evaluated their trust according to the informational bases of trust: performance, process, and purpose. Participants were in a high- or low-risk group. Signaling systems varied by reliability (90%, 60%) within subjects and error bias (false alarm prone, miss prone) between subjects. RESULTS: False-alarm rate affected compliance but not reliance. Miss rate affected reliance but not compliance. Mediation analyses indicated that trust mediated the relationship between false-alarm rate and compliance. Bayesian mediation analyses favored evidence indicating trust did not mediate miss rate and reliance. Conditional indirect effects indicated that factors of trust mediated the relationship between false-alarm rate and compliance (i.e., purpose) and reliance (i.e., process) but only in the high-risk group. CONCLUSION: The compliance-reliance paradigm is not the reflection of two types of trust. APPLICATION: This research could be used to update training and design recommendations that are based upon the assumption that trust causes operator responses regardless of error bias.

Optimization of Checkerboard Spatial Frequencies for Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) are oscillations of the electroencephalogram (EEG) which are mainly observed over the occipital area that exhibit a frequency corresponding to a repetitively flashing visual stimulus. SSVEPs have proven to be very consistent and reliable signals for rapid EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI) control. There is conflicting evidence regarding whether solid or checkerboard-patterned flashing stimuli produce superior BCI performance. Furthermore, the spatial frequency of checkerboard stimuli can be varied for optimal performance. The present study performs an empirical evaluation of performance for a 4-class SSVEP-based BCI when the spatial frequency of the individual checkerboard stimuli is varied over a continuum ranging from a solid background to single-pixel checkerboard patterns. The results indicate that a spatial frequency of 2.4 cycles per degree can maximize the information transfer rate with a reduction in subjective visual irritation compared to lower spatial frequencies. This important finding on stimulus design can lead to improved performance and usability of SSVEP-based BCIs.

The Gaze-Cueing Effect in the United States and Japan: Influence of Cultural Differences in Cognitive Strategies on Control of Attention.

The direction of gaze automatically and exogenously guides visual spatial attention, a phenomenon termed as the gaze-cueing effect. Although this effect arises when the duration of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between a non-predictive gaze cue and the target is relatively long, no empirical research has examined the factors underlying this extended cueing effect. Two experiments compared the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs (700 ms) in Japanese and American participants. Cross-cultural studies on cognition suggest that Westerners tend to use a context-independent analytical strategy to process visual environments, whereas Asians use a context-dependent holistic approach. We hypothesized that Japanese participants would not demonstrate the gaze-cueing effect at longer SOAs because they are more sensitive to contextual information, such as the knowledge that the direction of a gaze is not predictive. Furthermore, we hypothesized that American participants would demonstrate the gaze-cueing effect at the long SOAs because they tend to follow gaze direction whether it is predictive or not. In Experiment 1, American participants demonstrated the gaze-cueing effect at the long SOA, indicating that their attention was driven by the central non-predictive gaze direction regardless of the SOAs. In Experiment 2, Japanese participants demonstrated no gaze-cueing effect at the long SOA, suggesting that the Japanese participants exercised voluntary control of their attention, which inhibited the gaze-cueing effect with the long SOA. Our findings suggest that the control of visual spatial attention elicited by social stimuli systematically differs between American and Japanese individuals.

Early Visual Perception Potentiated by Object Affordances: Evidence From a Temporal Order Judgment Task.

Perceived objects automatically potentiate afforded action. Object affordances also facilitate perception of such objects, and this occurrence is known as the affordance effect. This study examined whether object affordances facilitate the initial visual processing stage, or perceptual entry processes, using the temporal order judgment task. The onset of the graspable (right-handled) coffee cup was perceived earlier than that of the less graspable (left-handled) cup for right-handed participants. The affordance effect was eliminated when the coffee cups were inverted, which presumably conveyed less affordance information. These results suggest that objects preattentively potentiate the perceptual entry processes in response to their affordances.

Age-Related Differences in Vehicle Control and Eye Movement Patterns at Intersections: Older and Middle-Aged Drivers.

Older drivers are at increased risk of intersection crashes. Previous work found that older drivers execute less frequent glances for detecting potential threats at intersections than middle-aged drivers. Yet, earlier work has also shown that an active training program doubled the frequency of these glances among older drivers, suggesting that these effects are not necessarily due to age-related functional declines. In light of findings, the current study sought to explore the ability of older drivers to coordinate their head and eye movements while simultaneously steering the vehicle as well as their glance behavior at intersections. In a driving simulator, older (M = 76 yrs) and middle-aged (M = 58 yrs) drivers completed different driving tasks: (1) travelling straight on a highway while scanning for peripheral information (a visual search task) and (2) navigating intersections with areas potential hazard. The results replicate that the older drivers did not execute glances for potential threats to the sides when turning at intersections as frequently as the middle-aged drivers. Furthermore, the results demonstrate costs of performing two concurrent tasks, highway driving and visual search task on the side displays: the older drivers performed more poorly on the visual search task and needed to correct their steering positions more compared to the middle-aged counterparts. The findings are consistent with the predictions and discussed in terms of a decoupling hypothesis, providing an account for the effects of the active training program.

Large reductions are possible in older driver crashes at intersections.

Among all crash types, the largest percentage of older driver fatalities occur at intersections. Many explanations have been offered for older drivers' increased risks of crashing at intersections; however, only recently was it determined that older drivers were much less likely to glance for latent threats after entering an intersection than middle-aged drivers. In response, training programmes were designed to increase the frequency of such glances. The programmes have proven effective, doubling the frequency of these glances for up to a period of two years post-training. The programmes take only an hour to administer and are not directly targeted at remediating any of the underlying declines in cognitive, visual or motor function that can explain the decrease in the frequency of glances for threat vehicles among older drivers. The first question we addressed was, what are the basic declines that can explain the decrease in glances for threat vehicles? The second question we addressed was, how did the training programme achieve the results it did without directly addressing these declines? We hypothesise that drivers are learning to decouple hand, foot and head movements in the training programmes and that this serialisation of behaviour essentially sidesteps the major declines in cognitive, visual and motor functions. We provide evidence that the assumptions of the decoupling hypothesis about the capabilities of older drivers when the movements are decoupled, are consistent with the evidence from existing experiments. More research is needed to evaluate this hypothesis.

Workload Capacity: A Response Time-Based Measure of Automation Dependence.

OBJECTIVE: An experiment used the workload capacity measure C(t) to quantify the processing efficiency of human-automation teams and identify operators' automation usage strategies in a speeded decision task. BACKGROUND: Although response accuracy rates and related measures are often used to measure the influence of an automated decision aid on human performance, aids can also influence response speed. Mean response times (RTs), however, conflate the influence of the human operator and the automated aid on team performance and may mask changes in the operator's performance strategy under aided conditions. The present study used a measure of parallel processing efficiency, or workload capacity, derived from empirical RT distributions as a novel gauge of human-automation performance and automation dependence in a speeded task. METHOD: Participants performed a speeded probabilistic decision task with and without the assistance of an automated aid. RT distributions were used to calculate two variants of a workload capacity measure, COR(t) and CAND(t). RESULTS: Capacity measures gave evidence that a diagnosis from the automated aid speeded human participants' responses, and that participants did not moderate their own decision times in anticipation of diagnoses from the aid. CONCLUSION AND APPLICATION: Workload capacity provides a sensitive and informative measure of human-automation performance and operators' automation dependence in speeded tasks.