The role of drivers’ social interactions in their driving behavior: Empirical evidence and implications for car-following and traffic flow

Models for describing the microscopic driving behavior rarely consider the “social effects” on drivers’ driving decisions. However, social effect can be generated due to interactions with surrounding vehicles and affect drivers’ driving behavior, e.g., the interactions result in imitating the behavior of peer drivers. Therefore, social environment and peer influence can impact the drivers’ instantaneous behavior and shift the individuals’ driving state. This study aims to explore empirical evidence for existence of a social effect, i.e., when a fast-moving vehicle passes a subject vehicle, does the driver mimic the behavior of passing vehicle? High-resolution Basic Safety Message data set (N = 151,380,578) from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is used to explore the issue. The data relates to positions, speeds, and accelerations of 63 host vehicles traveling in connected vehicles with detailed information on surrounding environment at a frequency of 10 Hz. Rigorous random parameter logit models are estimated to capture the heterogeneity among the observations and to explore if the correlates of social effect can vary both positively and negatively. Results show that subject drivers do mimic the behavior of passing vehicles –in 16 percent of passing events (N = 18,099 total passings occurred in freeways), subject vehicle drivers are observed to follow the passing vehicles accelerating. We found that only 1.2 percent of drivers normally sped up (10 km/hr in 10 s) during their trips, when they were not passed by other vehicles. However, if passed by a high speed vehicle the percentage of drivers who sped up is 16.0 percent. The speed change of at least 10 km/hr within 10 s duration is considered as accelerating threshold. Furthermore, the acceleration of subject vehicle is more likely if the speed of subject driver is higher and more surrounding vehicles are present. Interestingly, if the difference with passing vehicle speed is high, the likelihood of subject driver’s acceleration is lower, consistent with expectation that if such differences are too high, the subject driver may be minimally affected. The study provides new evidence that drivers’ social interactions can change traffic flow and implications of the study results are discussed.     

Reliability of variable message signs information: A field experiment study in Chongqing

A variable message sign (VMS), which is a key component of intelligent transportation systems, has been frequently used in the management of urban roads and motorways to provide drivers with real-time traffic condition information about a road section or area. Nevertheless, there is a lack of unified regulations for VMS design, which makes it difficult to accurately determine the understandability and legibility of VMS information. In practice, inappropriate designs of VMSs are common, such as overload of VMS information and excessive number of phases, particularly on the urban roads of China. Building on our earlier findings obtained by surveys, in this study, field tests were conducted to assess the reliability of VMS information in terms of the visual perception characteristics of drivers. For a full visual perception, the information displayed on a VMS must be reliable, i.e., it should be easy for drivers to detect, obtain, and understand the messages they require. Two basic theories—information theory and visual perception theory—were introduced to build a quantification model of VMS information, select evaluation indices, and design the experimental process. A total of 24 drivers participated in the field experiments and questionnaires. Five indices—information obtainment rate, periodic validity, driver subjective scoring and the corresponding UI (represents information intelligibility), and CE (represents information legibility)—were analyzed to evaluate their relationships to VMS information reliability. The results confirmed that the amount of information, and the scrolling period considering redundant distance, significantly affect the reliability of VMSs information. For static VMSs, the information obtainment rate and the subjective scoring decrease with increasing amount of information. The recollection accuracy of the drivers significantly declines when the amount of information shown increases to 90 bits, corresponding to an information obtainment rate of less than 0.8 and UI equal to 0. For dynamic VMSs, the information reliability deteriorates as the scrolling period shortens and the number of phases increases. Unreasonable reliability is found when the periodic validity is less than 0.9, i.e., the actual scrolling period is more than 10% less than the calculated one, corresponding to CE equal to 0. The reliability of information was evaluated by combining the subjective scoring of the drivers and a data-based statistical analysis and considering driving safety. Accordingly, it was recommended that 90 bit is the maximum amount of information to be shown on a VMS and that the preferred scrolling period of each phase of a dynamic VMS is 5 s. The results of this study support the objective of providing reliable information to drivers by addressing the problems related to the amount of information and presentation time for VMSs. These findings provide a basis for determining the thresholds for VMS information to promote practical and user-friendly designs of VMSs on urban roads.     

文字的“偷心术”:营销中的字体效应

文字是营销中视觉传播的重要元素, 它直接影响消费者对品牌的第一印象。文字的重要性不仅体现在文本内容上, 还体现在字形设计对消费者的影响上。字体的研究仍存在较大的空缺, 且现有文献多分散于语言学、设计学和心理学等不同学科领域。目前有较多存在矛盾的结论缺乏系统的框架支持, 本文为研究者提供了完整的字体效应研究框架。将字体进行定义及分类之后, 主要探讨了字体对消费者感知和行为的影响, 以及字体效应的三大心理机制, 即感知一致性、感知记忆性和感知人性化。在此基础上讨论了字体受到消费者特质、产品类型与外部环境的调节作用。最后, 深入分析了字体在市场营销中的理论和管理实践价值, 以及未来研究方向。     

走进大自然：自然体验及其积极效应

自然体验是指个体通过各种感官感知自然或与源于自然界的刺激互动。学者通常使用问卷测量法、自然指标法或实验操纵法来量化操纵人们的自然体验,发现接触自然可以在心理、生理和行为等方面产生积极效应。且这些积极效应会受到物理环境、个体以及社会因素的影响。未来应突破“城市——自然”二元对立思想并加强积极效应的纵深研究;拓展研究群体;促进相关研究成果的实际应用。     

Multiple sclerosis,emotion perception and social functioning

People with multiple sclerosis (MS) can experience problems in interpreting others’ emotions from faces or voices. However, to date little is known about whether difficulties in emotion perception in MS are related to broader aspects of social functioning. Also, there are few studies reporting the effect of MS on more ecologically valid assessments of emotion perception using multimodal videos. The current study looks at (1) the effect of MS on perceiving emotions from faces, voices and multimodal videos; (2) the possible role of slowed processing and executive dysfunction in emotion perception problems in MS and (3) the relationship between emotion perception and broader social functioning in MS. 53 people with MS and 31 healthy controls completed tasks of emotion perception and cognition, and assessed their levels of social support and social participation. Participants with MS performed worse than demographically matched controls on all measures of emotion perception. Emotion perception performance was related to cognitive measures in those with MS. Also, significant associations were found between emotion perception difficulties in MS and poorer social function. In particular, people with MS who had poorer emotion perception also reported lower levels of social support from their friends, and regression analysis showed that this prediction was maintained even when disease severity and cognitive function were taken into account. These results show that problems with emotion perception in MS extend to more realistic tasks and may predict key aspects of social functioning.     

Understanding the role of configural processing in face emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease

This investigation examined whether impairment in configural processing could explain deficits in face emotion recognition in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Stimuli from the Radboud Faces Database were used to compare recognition of four negative emotion expressions by older adults with PD (n = 16) and matched controls (n = 17). Participants were tasked with categorizing emotional expressions from upright and inverted whole faces and facial composites; it is difficult to derive configural information from these two types of stimuli so featural processing should play a larger than usual role in accurate recognition of emotional expressions. We found that the PD group were impaired relative to controls in recognizing anger, disgust and fearful expressions in upright faces. Then, consistent with a configural processing deficit, participants with PD showed no composite effect when attempting to identify facial expressions of anger, disgust and fear. A face inversion effect, however, was observed in the performance of all participants in both the whole faces and facial composites tasks. These findings can be explained in terms of a configural processing deficit if it is assumed that the disruption caused by facial composites was specific to configural processing, whereas inversion reduced performance by making it difficult to derive both featural and configural information from faces.     

阴谋论信念的产生机制——社会认知视角的三种解释

社会心理学将阴谋论视作一种意识形态上的信念,并定义为人们将重大的政治或社会事件归因为有权力的群体或个人暗中预谋以达成其目的的解释倾向。社会认知视角为个体这种阴谋论信念的产生提供了三种解释。错觉模式感知导致人们认知上倾向于在不相关的事件之间建立联系;敏感性动因觉察影响人们过度感知并假定事件背后的动因、目的和意图等;投射是将自己愿意参与阴谋的意图归因于事件中的他人。     

Emotional face recognition in autism and in cerebral visual impairments: In search for specificity

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by difficulties in the social domain, but also by hyper- and hypo-reactivity. Atypical visual behaviours and processing have often been observed. Nevertheless, several similar signs are also identified in other clinical conditions including cerebral visual impairments (CVI). In the present study, we investigated emotional face categorization in groups of children with ASD and CVI by comparing each group to typically developing individuals (TD) in two tasks. Stimuli were either non-filtered or filtered by low- and high-spatial frequencies (LSF and HSF). All participants completed the autism spectrum quotient score (AQ) and a complete neurovisual evaluation. The results show that while both clinical groups presented difficulties in the emotional face recognition tasks and atypical processing of filtered stimuli, they did not differ from one another. Additionally, autistic traits were observed in the CVI group and symmetrically, some visual disturbances were present in the ASD group as measured via the AQ score and a neurovisual evaluation, respectively. The present study suggests the relevance of comparing ASD to CVI by showing that emotional face categorization difficulties should not be solely considered as autism-specific but merit investigation for potential dysfunction of the visual processing neural network. These results are of interest in both clinical and research perspectives, indicating that systematic visual examination is warranted for individuals with ASD.     

特征信息和呈现时间对异族面孔知觉的影响

为了探讨面孔认知中内部特征和加工时间对种族判断的影响,采用面孔种族评价任务,选用被试内设计,通过操纵内部特征替换部位,刺激呈现时间,以及种族三个自变量进行研究.结果发现:对中国被试来说,面孔种族信息的获取是一个随时间不断累积信息的过程.在此过程中鼻和口特征并不能提供有效的亚洲和高加索种族信息,眼部特征和构型信息在加工中...