Lighting up cosy atmospheres in Denmark

This article explores the use of light to stage atmospheres in a residential area of Copenhagen, Denmark. Both natural and electrical lights enable visibility but they also impart a certain sense of place that influences the way people behave and feel. The article investigates how light is about more than individual perception and plays a crucial role in orchestrating a sense of community, solitude and ‘secureness’ at home. Such staging of atmospheres, it is argued, importantly relies on cultural premises and notions of intimacy, informality and relaxation, encompassed in the Danish term hygge, or cosiness. Light frames such sense of secureness and cosiness by allowing for visual oscillations between separation and connection of people, places and things. In this way, investigating the use of light in shaping atmosphere offers a lens to explore how connections and networks of people, emotions and things, shape the home and links interior and exterior spaces.     

Measuring drivers’ visual information needs during braking: A simulator study using a screen-occlusion method

It is commonly accepted that vision plays an important role in car braking, but it is unknown how people brake in the absence of visual information. In this simulator study, we measured drivers’ braking behaviour while they had to stop their car at designated positions on the road. The access to visual information was manipulated by occluding the screen at the start of half of the braking trials, while the temporal demand was manipulated by varying the time-to-arrival (TTA). Results showed that for the longer TTA values (⩾6 s), participants in the occlusion condition stopped too early and at variable positions on the road as compared to the control condition. In the occlusion condition, participants were likely to apply an intermediate brake pedal depression, whereas in the control condition participants more often applied low or high pedal depressions. The results are interpreted in light of a distance estimation test, in which we found that participants underestimated the actual distance by 70%.     

Sleepwalking Into Infertility: The Need for a Public Health Approach Toward Advanced Maternal Age

In Western countries today, a growing number of women delay motherhood until their late 30s and even 40s, as they invest time in pursuing education and career goals before starting a family. This social trend results from greater gender equality and expanded opportunities for women and is influenced by the availability of contraception and assisted reproductive technologies (ART). However, advanced maternal age is associated with increased health risks, including infertility. While individual medical solutions such as ART and elective egg freezing can promote reproductive autonomy, they entail significant risks and limitations. We thus argue that women should be better informed regarding the risks of advanced maternal age and ART, and that these individual solutions need to be supplemented by a public health approach, including policy measures that provide women with the opportunity to start a family earlier in life without sacrificing personal career goals.     

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.     

Analysis of advanced driver assistance systems in police vehicles: A survey study

Few studies have examined the impact of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) on police officers to improve driver safety and prevent crashes. This is in spite of police officers having higher driving-related mortality rates than average civilians. To fill this gap, a survey study was conducted on 73 police officers to assess their opinions on various ADAS features as well as their recommendations for improvement. Results of the correlation analyses indicated that officer behavior and opinion on ADAS features were influenced by the trust officers had in the available ADAS systems among other key factors such as ADAS training and perceived usefulness. On this basis, guidelines for future research and development of ADAS were provided to improve officer driving safety in police operations. The guidelines need to be further validated in future driving simulation or naturalistic studies.     

The power and sensitivity of four core driver workload measures for benchmarking the distraction potential of new driver vehicle interfaces

This study evaluated the power and sensitivity of several core driver workload measures in order to better understand their use as a component of future driver distraction potential evaluation procedures of the in-vehicle human machine interface (HMI). Driving is a task that requires visual, manual and cognitive resources to perform. Secondary tasks, such as mobile phone use and interaction with in-built navigation, which load onto any of these three processing resources increase driver workload and can lead to impaired driving. Because workload and distraction potential are interrelated, a comprehensive method to assess driver workload that produces valid and predictive results is needed to advance the science of distraction potential evaluation. It is also needed to incorporate into New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) testing regimes. Workload measures of cognitive (DRT [Detection Response Task] Reaction Time), visual (DRT Miss Rate), subjective (NASA-TLX [driver workload questionnaire]), and temporal demand (Task Interaction Time) were collected as participants drove one of 40 vehicles while completing a variety of secondary tasks with varying interaction requirements. Of the evaluated measures, variance and power analyses demonstrated that Task Interaction Time is the most sensitive in detecting differences in driver workload between different in-vehicle HMIs, followed by DRT Miss Rate, NASA-TLX and finally DRT Reaction Time. There were relatively weak correlations between each of the four measures. These results suggest that Task Interaction Time, coupled with a reliable visual demand metric such as DRT Miss Rate, eye glance coding, or visual occlusion, more efficiently detect differences in driver workload between different HMIs compared to DRT Reaction Time and the NASA-TLX questionnaire. These results can be used to improve the understanding of the utility of each of these core driver workload measures in assessing driver distraction potential.     

Should older people be considered a homogeneous group when interacting with level 3 automated vehicles?

Exploring the future mobility of older people is imperative for maintaining wellbeing and quality of life in an ageing society. The forthcoming level 3 automated vehicle may potentially benefit older people. In a level 3 automated vehicle, the driver can be completely disengaged from driving while, under some circumstances, being expected to take over the control occasionally. Existing research into older people and level 3 automated vehicles considers older people to be a homogeneous group, but it is not clear if different sub-groups of old people have different performance and perceptions when interacting with automated vehicles. To fill this research gap, a driving simulator investigation was conducted. We adopted a between-subjects experimental design with subgroup of old age as the independent variable. The differences in performance, behaviour, and perception towards level 3 automated vehicles between the younger old group (60–69 years old) and older old group (70 years old and over) was investigated. 15 subjects from the younger old group (mean age = 64.87 years, SD = 3.46 years) and 24 from the older old group (mean age = 75.13 years, SD = 3.35 years) participated in the study. The findings indicate that older people should not be regarded as a homogeneous group when interacting with automated vehicle. Compared to the younger old people, the older old people took over the control of the vehicle more slowly, and their takeover was less stable and more critical. However, both groups exhibited positive perceptions towards level 3 automation, and the of older old people’s perceptions were significantly more positive. This study demonstrated the importance of recognising older people as a heterogeneous group in terms of their performance, capabilities, needs and requirements when interacting with automated vehicles. This may have implications in the design of such systems and also understanding the market for autonomous mobility.     

机器学习在解决过拟合现象中的作用

过拟合现象是心理学走向预测科学的重要阻碍。文章综述了机器学习在解决过拟合现象中的价值和实现途径：（1）介绍了过拟合的两种表现形式和现状;（2）分析过拟合的根因,即“高解释力≠高预测力”;（3）厘清机器学习的建模逻辑与核心技术在解决过拟合中的作用;（4）利用样例数据和代码说明机器学习统计思想在模型拟合中的具体应用过程。文章指出心理学应从解决实际问题的角度出发,借鉴机器学习的分析思想,避免过拟合,进而提供更准确更稳定的结论和预测模型。     

Hybrid sales structures in the age of e-commerce

Sales organizations continue to exhibit meaningful changes in their structures during the e-commerce era. This article examines the impact of Internet technology on the evolution of sales organizations and identifies key components underpinning a successful hybrid sales structure. A comprehensive review of sales organization studies leads to the derivation of a hybrid sales structure model, as well as a series of key recommendations pertaining to the organization and sales performance. These findings establish a platform for further research into the hybrid sales structure. The transition from a reliance on traditional, outside sales forces to a concomitant use of inside sales personnel produces hybrid sales structures that can accommodate online buyer–seller interactions and also leverage technological advances in sales automation and business intelligence to boost sales performance.     

Security Technologies Versus Citizen Roles?

The idea of securitization holds that perceived threats and the ensuing need for security measures are mobilized in speech acts to legitimate bypassing of normal practices of democratic politics and justification. Citizens, as members of the political community, are thus effectively deprived of their agency. Attempts at securitization gain clout from the severity of the mobilized threat: the more convincingly a threat is argued to cause disruptions in the functioning of society and ultimately the loss of human life, the more acceptable it will become to bypass democratic governance in order to prevent the threat. Accordingly, security technologies can be conceived of as those technologies that are constructed and mobilized in such attempts at securitization and depoliticization. However, security technologies can also be thought of as technologies that are mobilized in face of existential threats more generally, regardless of whether their mobilization has a depoliticizing effect or not. Yet, as case studies on airport security scanners and security in smart grids show, not all implementations of security, even against existential threats, show this tendency of depoliticization as essential in securitization and in technologies of security. This article further demonstrates that the agency of citizens in the governance of these technologies importantly depends on whether or not the threat is perceived as internal or external to the referent object of the security programme.