Refining distraction potential testing guidelines by considering differences in glancing behavior

Driver distraction is a recognized cause of traffic accidents. Although the well-known guidelines for measuring distraction of secondary in-car tasks were published by the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2013, studies have raised concerns on the accuracy of the method defined in the guidelines, namely criticizing them for basing the diversity of the driver sample on driver age, and for inconsistent between-group results. In fact, it was recently discovered that the NHTSA driving simulator test is susceptible to rather fortuitous results when the participant sample is randomized. This suggests that the results of said test are highly dependent on the selected participants, rather than on the phenomenon being studied, for example, the effects of touch screen size on driver distraction. As an attempt to refine the current guidelines, we set out to study whether a previously proposed new testing method is as susceptible to the effects of participant randomization as the NHTSA method. This new testing method differs from the NHTSA method by two major accounts. First, the new method considers occlusion distance (i.e., how far a driver can drive with their vision covered) rather than age, and second, the new method considers driving in a more complex, and arguably, a more realistic environment than proposed in the NHTSA guidelines. Our results imply that the new method is less susceptible to sample randomization, and that occlusion distance appears a more robust criterion for driver sampling than merely driver age. Our results are applicable in further developing driver distraction guidelines and provide empirical evidence on the effect of individual differences in drivers’ glancing behavior.     

Do drivers accept cooperative behavior of their automated vehicle on highways?

Automated cooperatively interacting vehicles will change the future of traffic completely. Such vehicles will be capable of planning and carrying out maneuvers based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, enabling a safer driving experience. However, this gain of safety will only be effective if drivers use and accept the decisions made by advanced automated technology. Especially when drivers are cognitively distracted, new strategies might be necessary, e.g., by further explaining the reason for a cooperative decision.In a driving simulator study, we investigated the acceptance of lane change maneuvers in cooperative situations carried out by an automated vehicle on a two-lane German highway. When the automated system detected a potential lane change ahead, it carried out one of three possible maneuvers: accelerate, decelerate, or maintain speed. Participants (N = 20) were asked whether they accepted the system’s behavior either while being cognitively distracted or in an attentive state. Thus, we investigated the influence of a cognitively demanding secondary task and, in addition, further situational characteristics (Scope of action, Criticality for the lane-changing vehicle, Display of intention) on the acceptance towards the system’s behavior. Moreover, participants had to rate the perceived situation’s criticality.Results underlined the importance of explicit indication of the intention to change lanes. Furthermore, increased cognitive load led to a higher acceptance of the defensive system behavior. This study contributes to the development of a user-centered interface and interaction strategy for cooperative interacting vehicles.     

Decreasing Child Distress During Needle Sticks and Maintaining Treatment Gains Over Time

This study examined the effectiveness of an intervention for reducing behavioral distress in children during needle sticks. Participants were eight children and their parents. The children received injections or venipunctures for hematological or oncological disease. The distress management intervention included instruction for children to engage in a distraction activity during needle sticks and parent training in coaching their children. The intervention was adapted to clinic and home treatment settings. Results indicated that five children exhibited significantly less distress after treatment when compared with baseline sessions, that treatment gains were maintained at follow-up for three of them, and that child distress was significantly and negatively related to use of the experimental distractor. Implications for clinical practice are discussed.     

国外反刍思维研究综述

反刍思维是一种反复关注自身消极情绪及相应事件的思维方式。解释反刍思维的理论有反应风格理论、目标驱动反刍理论、自我调节的执行功能模型。反刍思维与心理健康有密切关系,它的干预方法主要是心智觉知认知疗法、表达性笔记和认知再评价等。厘清反刍思维概念、完善研究方法、拓展研究范围、探讨文化差异是未来研究趋向。     

音乐对驾驶警觉的影响及其理论模型

驾车时听音乐非常普遍。唤醒理论认为, 音乐可以使驾驶员处于最佳唤醒水平, 有利于驾驶警觉的维持。但是, 根据中枢容量有限理论, 音乐也会使驾驶员分心, 危害道路安全。动态模型在已有研究的基础上提出, 音乐对驾驶警觉起到唤醒抑或分心影响, 取决于音乐复杂性、驾驶情境要求及驾驶员个体差异等诸多因素的动态调节。最新的补偿控制理论则强调, 驾驶员自我调控是恢复动态平衡的关键。而未来的研究应关注驾驶员心理负荷的测量、智能车载音乐系统的开发以及驾驶员培训等领域。     

Identifying effects of driving and secondary task demands,passenger presence,and driver characteristics on driving errors and traffic violations – Using naturalistic driving data segments preceding both safety critical events and matched baselines

Researchers have identified various factors that likely affect aberrant driving behaviors and therefore crash risk. However, it remains unclear which of these factors poses the greatest risk for committing either errors or violations under naturalistic driving conditions. This study investigated important variables contributing to driving errors and traffic violations based on naturalistic driving data from the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2). The analyzed driving segments preceded both safety critical events and matched baselines. Results showed that intersection influence, high-risk visually distracting secondary tasks, and the severities of the safety critical events were the main factors associated with driving errors. The primary factors linked to violations were intersection influence, persistent individual differences in driver behavior, and the severities of the safety critical events. Furthermore, the number of aberrant driving behaviors in trip segments preceding crashes was higher than in the matched segments unrelated to safety critical events. However, the most common aberrant driving behavior types in the respective segment groups appeared to resemble each other. This suggests that crashes became more likely due to drivers committing more violations and errors overall as opposed to drivers making one certain type of error or violation.     

偏差声音干扰刺激对视觉注意网络系统的影响

结合注意网络测量工具和听视ODDBALL干扰范式,考察偏差声音干扰刺激的出现对注意网络系统不同功能的影响。结果发现,声音刺激序列下,视觉线索唤醒效应均消失; 标准声音刺激下,不存在线索的脱离和转移效应; 偏差声音刺激下,出现线索脱离和转移效应。研究表明,注意网络中的警觉功能具有超通道加工机制,偏差刺激下视觉注意系统中注意定向和线索转移效应的出现表明偏差干扰效应主要由偏差刺激引起的注意脱离和注意转移损耗部分引起。     

The attentional cost of inattentional blindness

When our attention is engaged in a visual task, we can be blind to events which would otherwise not be missed. In three experiments, 97 out of the 165 observers performing a visual attention task failed to notice an unexpected, irrelevant object moving across the display. Surprisingly, this object significantly lowered accuracy in the primary task when, and only when, it failed to reach awareness. We suggest that an unexpected stimulus causes a state of alert that would normally generate an attentional shift; if this response is prevented by an attention-consuming task, a portion of the attentional resources remains allocated to the object. Such a portion is large enough to disturb performance, but not so large that the object can be recognized as task-irrelevant and accordingly ignored. Our findings have one counterintuitive implication: irrelevant stimuli might hamper some types of performance only when perceived subliminally.     

The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task

Unexpected stimuli are often able to distract us away from a task at hand. The present study seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Studies of involuntary attention capture using the oddball task have repeatedly shown that infrequent auditory changes in a series of otherwise repeating sounds trigger an automatic response to the novel or deviant stimulus. This attention capture has been shown to disrupt participants' behavioral performance in a primary task, even when distractors and targets are asynchronous and presented in distinct sensory modalities. This distraction effect is generally considered as a by-product of the capture of attention by the novel or deviant stimulus, but the exact cognitive locus of this effect and the interplay between attention capture and target processing has remained relatively ignored. The present study reports three behavioral experiments using a cross-modal oddball task to examine whether the distraction triggered by auditory novelty affects the processing of the target stimuli. Our results showed that variations in the demands placed on the visual analysis (Experiment 1) or categorical processing of the target (Experiment 2) did not impact on distraction. Instead, the cancellation of distraction by the presentation of an irrelevant visual stimulus presented immediately before the visual target (Experiment 3) suggested that distraction originated in the shifts of attention occurring between attention capture and the onset of the target processing. Possible accounts of these shifts are discussed.     

Attentional bias for body and food in eating disorders: increased distraction, speeded detection, or both?

Previous research suggests that eating disorder patients show an attentional bias for body- and food-related information. However, so far little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the attentional favoring of this particular information in eating disorder patients. In the present study, we used both a body and a food visual search task to study speeded detection and increased distraction in eating disorder patients (n=67) and healthy controls (n=60). Compared with controls, eating disorder patients showed evidence of speeded detection of body-related information, and increased distraction by food information. These results suggest that the mechanism underlying the biased attentional allocation of eating disorder patients varies, and is dependent upon the type of information they are presented with.