Sleep loss and change detection in simulated driving.

Driver sleepiness is a leading contributor to road crashes. Sleep-related crashes are more likely to involve collision with a stationary object than non-sleep-related crashes. The mechanism underpinning this is unknown; one potential explanation may be an increased propensity for change blindness.

Defining the attributes for specific playing positions in football match-play: A complex systems approach.

Introduction: Talent identification and development programmes that retain and develop athletes are integral to the sporting success of National Governing Bodies in football. Currently, player attributes are studied in isolation without considering the complexity of interacting components of football performance. The current study applied a systems analysis framework to describe, in a structured and systematic way, the attributes for specific playing positions in football match-play.

The impact of sleep loss on sustained and transient attention: an EEG study.

Sleep is one of our most important physiological functions that maintains physical and mental health. Two studies examined whether discrete areas of attention are equally affected by sleep loss. This was achieved using a repeated-measures within-subjects design, with two contrasting conditions: normal sleep and partial sleep restriction of 5-h.

Temporal predictability does not impact attentional blink performance: effects of fixed vs. random inter-trial intervals.

Background: Does the inclusion of a randomized inter-trial interval (ITI) impact performance on an Attentional Blink (AB) task? The AB phenomenon is often used as a test of transient attention (Dux & Marois, 2009); however, it is unclear whether incorporating aspects of sustained attention, by implementing a randomized ITI, would impact task performance. The current research sought to investigate this, by contrasting a standard version of the AB task with a random ITI version to determine whether performance changed, reflecting a change in difficulty, engagement, or motivation.

Method: Thirty university students (21 female; age range 18-57, = 21.

Effects of roadside memorials on drivers' risk perception and eye movements.

Road crashes are a leading cause of death worldwide. In many countries, it is common to see spontaneous roadside memorials constructed in response to road fatalities. These memorials are controversial and are explicitly banned in many jurisdictions.

Bad behaviour or societal failure? Perceptions of the factors contributing to drivers' engagement in the fatal five driving behaviours.

The so-called 'fatal five' behaviours (drink and drug driving, distraction and inattention, speeding, fatigue, and failure to wear a seat belt) are known to be the major behavioural contributory factors to road trauma. However, little is known about the factors that lead to drivers engaging in each behaviour. This article presents the findings from a study which collected and analysed data on the factors that lead to drivers engaging in each behaviour.

The unexpected killer: effects of stimulus threat and negative affectivity on inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness (IB) occurs when observers fail to detect unexpected objects or events. Despite the adaptive importance of detecting unexpected threats, relatively little research has examined how stimulus threat influences IB. The current study was designed to explore the effects of stimulus threat on IB.

To stop or not to stop: Contrasting compliant and non-compliant driver behaviour at rural rail level crossings.

Many rail level crossings (RLXs) have only passive protection, such as static signs instructing road users to stop, yield, or look for trains. Stop signs have been suggested as a low-cost option to improve safety at passive RLXs, as requiring drivers to stop should encourage safe behaviour. However, field observations have noted high rates of non-compliance at stop-controlled RLXs.

Do cyclists make better drivers? Associations between cycling experience and change detection in road scenes.

Efficient processing of visual information is crucial to safe driving. Previous research has demonstrated that driving experience strongly affects attentional allocation, with large differences between novice and experienced drivers. Expanding on this, we explored the influence of non-driving experiences on attentional allocation by comparing drivers with and without cycling experience.

Risk and safety perception on urban and rural roads: Effects of environmental features, driver age and risk sensitivity.

Objective: The ability to detect changing visual information is a vital component of safe driving. In addition to detecting changing visual information, drivers must also interpret its relevance to safety. Environmental changes considered to have high safety relevance will likely demand greater attention and more timely responses than those considered to have lower safety relevance.

Change detection in urban and rural driving scenes: Effects of target type and safety relevance on change blindness.

The ability to detect changes is crucial for safe driving. Previous research has demonstrated that drivers often experience change blindness, which refers to failed or delayed change detection. The current study explored how susceptibility to change blindness varies as a function of the driving environment, type of object changed, and safety relevance of the change.

A driving simulator evaluation of potential speed reductions using two innovative designs for signalised urban intersections.

Intersections are typically associated with a higher level of crash risk than other types of facilities on the road network. Standard cross-road intersections are particularly hazardous because by their very design, drivers may travel through at speeds that are incompatible with human biomechanical tolerance should a crash occur. Further, drivers are exposed to dangerous conflict angles, which are likely to result in serious injury.

Using the decision ladder to understand road user decision making at actively controlled rail level crossings.

Rail level crossings (RLXs) represent a key strategic risk for railways worldwide. Despite enforcement and engineering countermeasures, user behaviour at RLXs can often confound expectations and erode safety. Research in this area is limited by a relative absence of insights into actual decision making processes and a focus on only a subset of road user types.

Inattentional blindness in older adults: Effects of attentional set and to-be-ignored distractors.

Inattentional blindness (IB) involves failing to detect an unexpected visual stimulus while undertaking another task. Previous research has predominantly investigated IB using young adult samples, with few studies exploring whether or how an observer's age affects their detection of unexpected events. To help address this gap, we compared younger adults (18-25 years of age) and older adults (60-80 years of age) on two IB tasks: one dynamic, one static.

The relationship between sustained inattentional blindness and working memory capacity.

Inattentional blindness, whereby observers fail to detect unexpected stimuli, has been robustly demonstrated in a range of situations. Originally research focused primarily on how stimulus characteristics and task demands affect inattentional blindness, but increasingly studies are exploring the influence of observer characteristics on the detection of unexpected stimuli. It has been proposed that individual differences in working memory capacity predict inattentional blindness, on the assumption that higher working memory capacity confers greater attentional capacity for processing unexpected stimuli.

Object-scene relationships vary the magnitude of target prevalence effects in visual search.

Efficiency of visual search in real-world tasks is affected by several factors, including scene context and target prevalence. Observers are more efficient at detecting target objects in congruent locations, and less efficient at detecting rare targets. Although target prevalence and placement often covary, previous research has investigated context and prevalence effects independently.

Variability in decision-making and critical cue use by different road users at rail level crossings.

Collisions at rail level crossings (RLXs) are typically high-severity and high-cost, often involving serious injuries, fatalities and major disruptions to the transport network. Most research examining behaviour at RLXs has focused exclusively on drivers and consequently there is little knowledge on how other road users make decisions at RLXs. We collected drivers', motorcyclists', bicyclists' and pedestrians' self-reported daily experiences at RLXs for two weeks, focusing on behaviour, decision-making and information use in the presence of a train and/or activated RLX signals.

Where do novice and experienced drivers direct their attention on approach to urban rail level crossings?

Crashes at rail level crossings (RLXs) remain a persistent but ill-defined safety issue. In urban areas, RLXs are typically located in areas of high workload and visual clutter, such as busy shopping strips. Despite this, the impact of such environments on driver behaviour and compliance with RLX controls is not well understood.

Personality domains and traits that predict self-reported aberrant driving behaviours in a southeastern US university sample.

Personality traits are meaningful predictors of many significant life outcomes, including mortality. Several studies have investigated the relationship between specific personality traits and driving behaviours, e.g.

Safety in numbers: target prevalence affects the detection of vehicles during simulated driving.

The "low-prevalence effect" refers to the fact that observers often fail to detect rare targets (<5 % prevalence) during visual search tasks. Previous research has demonstrated robust prevalence effects in real-world tasks that employ static images, such as airport luggage screening. No published research has examined prevalence effects in dynamic tasks, such as driving.

Driver inattention and driver distraction in serious casualty crashes: data from the Australian National Crash In-depth Study.

Driver inattention and driver distraction represent a major problem in road safety. Although both are believed to contribute to increased crash risk, there is currently limited reliable information on their role in crashes. The current study used in-depth data from the Australian National Crash In-depth Study to investigate the role of driver distraction and inattention in serious casualty crashes.

Minds on the blink: the relationship between inattentional blindness and attentional blink.

Failures of conscious visual awareness occur when specific task demands prevent an observer from detecting a stimulus that would otherwise be clearly visible. Two examples are inattentional blindness (IB) and attentional blink (AB). IB is the failure to detect an unexpected stimulus when attention is otherwise engaged.

Attending to music decreases inattentional blindness.

This article investigates how auditory attention affects inattentional blindness (IB), a failure of conscious awareness in which an observer does not notice an unexpected event because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Previous research using the attentional blink paradigm has indicated that listening to music can reduce failures of conscious awareness. It was proposed that listening to music would decrease IB by reducing observers' frequency of task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs).

Looking without seeing or seeing without looking? Eye movements in sustained inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness (IB) describes the failure to notice salient but unexpected stimuli when attention is partially engaged by another task. Few studies have explicitly investigated the role of eye movements in IB and the relative contributions of overt and covert attention. We recorded eye movements in a series of IB experiments using dynamic stimuli.