驾驶员在交通场景中的变化视盲及其启示

变化视盲(change blindness)现象,也称变化盲,是指视觉情景中人们不能觉察到某个事物变化的现象。研究以驾驶员为主体探讨了道路交通领域中的变化视盲现象。首先,从场景变化特征和驾驶员特征两个方面综述了影响驾驶员变化视盲的影响因素;其次,结合影响因素与变化视盲的特征理论建立了驾驶员变化检测的认知过程模型;最后,在模型的基础上,讨论了提高驾驶员变化检测能力的实际意义和潜在措施,并对未来有关交通安全变化视盲的研究予以展望。     

Gender differences in attitudes towards driving and demand for private Insurance: Evidence from middle class drivers

This article examines the existence of associations between the gender of the driver, their risk behavior when driving motor vehicles and their inclination to acquire automobile insurance. To conduct this investigation a random survey was carried out with 566 middle class adults in 66 Brazilian towns and cities. By using non-parametric tests and logit models, the results suggest that even when controlling for other variables, women feel a greater need to have automobile insurance to protect themselves in the event of possible accidents under rainy conditions and also to have access to driver support services. Women also tend to have more respect for speed limits in various situations, such as during the rush hour, on local roads and on highways. The results also showed that men feel safer than women driving in more precarious situations: at night, in unfamiliar areas, after drinking, or even when they are tired. These results, in addition to contributing to the theoretical development of road traffic and transportation safety, are of special relevance to the financial industry and the regulatory agency. The insurance industry may find these results particularly helpful in designing future policies and setting premiums.     

Using the EZ-diffusion model to score a Single-Category Implicit Association Test of physical activity

ObjectiveThe Single-Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) has been used as a method for assessing automatic evaluations of physical activity, but measurement artifact or consciously-held attitudes could be confounding the outcome scores of these measures. The objective of these two studies was to address these measurement concerns by testing the validity of a novel SC-IAT scoring technique.DesignStudy 1 was a cross-sectional study, and study 2 was a prospective study.MethodIn study 1, undergraduate students (N = 104) completed SC-IATs for physical activity, flowers, and sedentary behavior. In study 2, undergraduate students (N = 91) completed a SC-IAT for physical activity, self-reported affective and instrumental attitudes toward physical activity, physical activity intentions, and wore an accelerometer for two weeks. The EZ-diffusion model was used to decompose the SC-IAT into three process component scores including the information processing efficiency score.ResultsIn study 1, a series of structural equation model comparisons revealed that the information processing score did not share variability across distinct SC-IATs, suggesting it does not represent systematic measurement artifact. In study 2, the information processing efficiency score was shown to be unrelated to self-reported affective and instrumental attitudes toward physical activity, and positively related to physical activity behavior, above and beyond the traditional D-score of the SC-IAT.ConclusionsThe information processing efficiency score is a valid measure of automatic evaluations of physical activity.     

“Walking the talk”: the role of frontline supervisors in preventing workplace accidents

ABSTRACT

Most existing safety research focuses on climate and leadership, with most leadership studies investigating transformational leadership, which is likely to be more impactful when exhibited by executives that by frontline supervisors. Therefore, focusing on frontline supervisors, we investigate how leaders who “walk the talk”, by directly modelling safety behaviours, might encourage subordinates to behave more safely. Using a three-level sample consisting of 579 employees and their supervisors working in 161 groups within 53 organizations, we test a multisource multilevel indirect effects model. Results indicate that safety climate and supervisors modelling safety compliance explain unique variance in safety outcomes. We then addressed an unanswered question concerning whether safety climate is best conceptualized as a group or organizational-level phenomenon, finding that the group-level assessment of safety climate explained more variance in safety outcomes than the organizational-level assessment of safety climate. Both sets of results are consistent with social information processing theory and social learning theory, which highlight the immediate social environment’s influence on employees’ behaviour.     

Further evidence of the heterogeneous nature of impulsivity

‘Impulsivity’ refers to a range of behaviours including preference for immediate reward (temporal-impulsivity) and the tendency to make premature decisions (reflection-impulsivity) and responses (motor-impulsivity). The current study aimed to examine how different behavioural and self-report measurements of impulsivity can be categorised into distinct subtypes.Exploratory factor analysis using full information maximum likelihood was conducted on 10 behavioural and 1 self-report measure of impulsivity.Four factors of impulsivity were indicated, with Factor 1 having a high loading of the Stop Signal Task, which measures motor-impulsivity, factor 2 representing reflection-impulsivity with loadings of the Information Sampling Task and Matching Familiar Figures Task, factor 3 representing the Immediate Memory Task, and finally factor 4 which represents the Delay Discounting Questionnaire and The Monetary Choice Questionnaire, measurements of temporal-impulsivity.These findings indicated that impulsivity is not a unitary construct, and instead represents a series of independent subtypes. There was evidence of a distinct reflection-impulsivity factor, providing the first factor analysis support for this subtype. There was also support for additional factors of motor- and temporal-impulsivity. The present findings indicated that a number of currently accepted tasks cannot be considered as indexing motor- and temporal-impulsivity suggesting that additional characterisations of impulsivity may be required.     

What's in a List?:A Rule of Interpretation for Hindu Dharma Offered in Response to Maria Hibbets

The study of South Asian ethics presents a variety of problems for the comparative ethicist. This response focuses on one such problem relating to Hinduism: the pervasive use of nonsystematic lists as a source of ethical injunctions and guidelines. The author demonstrates how an indigenous hermeneutic may unpack a list that contains the gift of fearlessness among other gifts. The source of this interpretation is Purva Mimamsa, an ancient Indian school of philosophy that specialized in language and the application of sacrificial logic to law and ethics. The same principles that allowed ritual specialists to sort out a huge array of rules into proper injunctions also allow us to make sense of ethical principles embodied in puzzling lists of concrete items.     

Extending adaptive world modeling by identifying and handling insufficient knowledge models

Adaptive knowledge modeling is an approach for extending the abilities of the Object-Oriented World Model, a system for representing the state of an observed real-world environment, to open-world modeling. In open environments, entities unforeseen at the design-time of a world model can occur. For coping with such circumstances, adaptive knowledge modeling is tasked with adapting the underlying knowledge model according to the environment. The approach is based on quantitative measures, introduced previously, for rating the quality of knowledge models. In this contribution, adaptive knowledge modeling is extended by measures for detecting the need for model adaptation and identifying the potential starting points of necessary model change as well as by an approach for applying such change. Being an extended and more detailed version of [17], the contribution also provides background information on the architecture of the Object-Oriented World Model and on the principles of adaptive knowledge modeling, as well as examination results for the proposed methods. In addition, a more complex scenario is used to evaluate the overall approach.     

Altruistic or selfish? Responses when safety is threatened depend on childhood socioeconomic status

Altruism is an effective method of coping with threats. This research explored the relationship between childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and altruism under different situations. The results of five studies provided reliable evidence that safety-threat conditions moderated the relationship between childhood SES and altruism. Individuals with higher childhood SES exhibited higher altruistic intentions (Studies 1 and 2) and behaviors (Study 3) when they were manipulated to imagine a safety threat scenario (Study 1), when viewing pictures of disasters (Study 2), and when they were manipulated to believe that their health was under threat (Study 3). However, their childhood SES had no significant impact on their altruistic intentions and behaviors in relatively safe environments (Studies 1–3). This effect was again tested in more realistic environmental conditions using a large-scale survey in Study 4. In Study 5, we explored the underlying mechanism behind the earlier findings (i.e., temporal discounting).