Obstacle avoidance under automated steering: Impact on driving and gaze behaviours

Within the context of more and more autonomous vehicles, an automatic lateral control device (AS: Automatic Steering) was used to steer the vehicle along the road without drivers’ intervention. The device was not able to detect and avoid obstacles. The experiment aimed to analyse unexpected obstacle avoidance manoeuvres when lateral control was delegated to automation. It was hypothesized that drivers skirting behaviours and eye movement patterns would be modified with automated steering compared with a control situation without automation. Eighteen participants took part in a driving simulator study. Steering behaviours and eye movements were analysed during obstacle avoidance episodes. Compared with driving without automation, skirting around obstacles was found to be less effective when drivers had to return from automatic steering to manual control. Eye movements were modified in the presence of automatic steering, revealing further ahead visual scanning of the driving environment. Resuming manual control is not only a problem of action performance but is also related to the reorganisation of drivers’ visual strategies linked to drivers’ disengagement from the steering task. Assistance designers should pay particular attention to potential changes in drivers’ activity when carrying out development work on highly automated vehicles.     

The Association between Attachment Styles and Physical Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration and Victimization: A Meta‐Analysis

In this meta‐analysis, we examine attachment styles—something commonly incorporated into couples therapy—and their association with physical intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration and victimization among men and women. This meta‐analysis incorporated 33 studies that looked at the association between four different attachment styles and IPV. This study examined the strength of the correlation among different attachment styles and IPV perpetration and victimization, examined gender differences in the strength of the association among attachment styles and IPV, and compared the strength of the association with IPV among different attachment styles. We found that anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment styles were all significantly associated with physical IPV perpetration and victimization. Secure attachment was significantly negatively related to IPV perpetration and victimization. There was a significantly stronger association between avoidant attachment and IPV victimization for women compared to men. Clinical implications related to the importance of fostering secure attachments when working with couples or individuals who have experienced IPV are addressed.     

Hazard-based duration approach for understanding pedestrian crossing risk exposure at signalised intersection crosswalks – A case study of Kolkata,India

Pedestrian signal violation is a significant concern among policymakers and traffic engineers as this leads to a pedestrian-vehicle crash. The waiting time for a pedestrian at intersections is crucial in street-crossing decision-making. Once pedestrians terminate their waiting behaviour during the red-light period, they would cross in the red light and put themselves in danger. A total of 2089 red-light arriving pedestrian observations were made at eight intersection crosswalks across Kolkata city (India). With the help of hazard-based duration models, the waiting duration till signal violation has been analysed. Kaplan–Meier curve has been plotted to understand the survival probabilities. A semi-parametric Cox Proportional Hazard model was used to understand the different factors influencing signal violation behaviour. However, the proportional hazard assumption was not satisfied. Therefore, a parametric Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model was used to understand the various covariates that affect the waiting duration. The results highlighted that 49.5% of pedestrians crossed immediately after arriving at the intersection in the red-light phase. A pedestrian’s probability of crossing the road when it is unsafe, i.e., motor vehicles still have green or yellow, varies with the waiting time. As waiting time increases, pedestrians get impatient and violate the traffic signal. This violation places them at an increased risk of being struck by a motor vehicle. The covariate analysis using the AFT model showed that pedestrian glance/looking behaviour, different types of distractions, signal cycle length, carrying luggage, and traffic plying on the road impacted signal violation behaviour. Signal modifications by reducing red-light phase length for pedestrians might be the most efficient means of reducing the likelihood of signal violation and being hit by a motor vehicle.     

When should I trust my gut? Linking domain expertise to intuitive decision-making effectiveness

Despite a growing body of scholarship on the concept of intuition, there is a scarcity of empirical research spotlighting the circumstances in which intuitive decision making is effective relative to analytical decision making. Seeking to address this deficiency, we conducted two laboratory studies assessing the link between domain expertise (low versus high) and intuitive decision-making effectiveness. These studies involved non-decomposable tasks across divergent expertise domains: basketball in Study 1 and designer handbag authentication in Study 2. Across both studies, and consistent with our overarching hypothesis, we found that the effectiveness of intuition relative to analysis is amplified at a high level of domain expertise. Taken together, our results demonstrate the importance of domain expertise in intuitive decision making and carry a number of theoretical and practical implications.     

The Miscarriage Experience: More Than Just a Trigger to Psychological Morbidity?

Most quantitative research considers miscarriage a trigger to grief, anxiety and depression. The present qualitative study involved in depth interviews with a heterogeneous sample of 13 women who had experienced a miscarriage up to five weeks previously. The women described their experiences using a range of themes which were conceptualised into three stages: turmoil, adjustment and resolution. For the majority, the turmoil stage was characterised by feelings of being unprepared and negative emotions. Some women who had had an unwanted pregnancy described their shock at the physical trauma of miscarriage but described the experience as a relief. The women then described a period of adjustment involving social comparisons, sharing and a search for meaning. The latter included a focus on causality which left a minority, particularly those who had had previous miscarriages, feeling frustrated with the absence of a satisfactory medical explanation. The final resolution stage was characterised by a decline in negative emotions, a belief by some that the miscarriage was a learning experience and the integration of the experience into their lives. This resolution seemed more positive for those with children and more negative if the miscarriage was not their first. Rather than being a trigger to psychological morbidity a miscarriage should be conceptualised as a process involving the stages of turmoil, adjustment and resolution. Miscarriage could also be considered a pivotal point in the lives of many women resulting in the reassessment of both their past and future experiences.     

Guarding the perimeter: The outside-inside dichotomy in disgust and bodily experience

Blending phenomenological and evolutionary approaches, three studies explored the relationship between the body, the self, and disgust. Study 1 demonstrated that body parts that interface with the environment are sensed more than internal body parts, and are more intimately associated with the self. Studies 2 and 3, exploring the bodily distribution of disgust via organ transplantation scenarios, revealed that (a) transplantation of interface body parts is more disgusting than transplantation of internal parts; (b) others' interface parts elicit greater disgust than others' internal parts; and (c) individual differences in disgust sensitivity manifest primarily in reasoning about interface parts. The outer/inner dichotomy is a fundamental feature of the relationship between body and self, reflecting the adaptive utility of concentrating attention on the interface with the environment. Correspondingly, disgust, the emotion that protects the organism from contamination, is focused on the intersection between the body and the environment.     

Resolving conflicting views: Gaze and arrow cues do not trigger rapid reflexive shifts of attention

It has become widely accepted that the direction of another individual's eye gaze induces rapid, automatic, attentional orienting, due to it being such a vital cue as to where in our environment we should attend. This automatic orienting has also been associated with the directional-arrow cues used in studies of spatial attention. Here, we present evidence that the response-time cueing effects reported for spatially nonpredictive gaze and arrow cues are not the result of rapid, automatic shifts of attention. For both cue types, response-time effects were observed only for long-duration cue and target stimuli that overlapped temporally, were largest when the cues were presented simultaneously with the response-relevant target, and were driven by a slowing of responses for invalidly cued targets rather than speeding for validly cued ones. These results argue against automatic attention-orienting accounts and support a novel spatial-incongruency explanation for a whole class of rapid behavioural cueing effects.