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Journal Article

Citation

Andersen GJ, Ni R, Bian Z, Kang J. Accid. Anal. Prev. 2011; 43(1): 381-390.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.aap.2010.09.007

PMID

21094336

PMCID

PMC2991164

Abstract

The present study examined the limits of spatial attention while performing two driving relevant tasks that varied in depth. The first task was to maintain a fixed headway distance behind a lead vehicle that varied speed. The second task was to detect a light-change target in an array of lights located above the roadway. In Experiment 1 the light detection task required drivers to encode color and location. The results indicated that reaction time to detect a light-change target increased and accuracy decreased as a function of the horizontal location of the light-change target and as a function of the distance from the driver. In a second experiment the light change task was changed to a singleton search (detect the onset of a yellow light) and the workload of the car following task was systematically varied. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that RT increased as a function of task workload, the 2D position of the light-change target and the distance of the light-change target. A multiple regression analysis indicated that the effect of distance on light detection performance was not due to changes in the projected size of the light target. In Experiment 3 we found that the distance effect in detecting a light change could not be explained by the location of eye fixations. The results demonstrate that when drivers attend to a roadway scene attention is limited in three-dimensional space. These results have important implications for developing tests for assessing crash risk among drivers as well as the design of in vehicle technologies such as head-up displays.


Language: en

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