Kinematic cues in driver-pedestrian communication to support safe road crossing.

Objective: Right-of-way negotiation between drivers and pedestrians often relies on explicit (e.g., waving) and implicit (e.

Driver response and recovery following automation initiated disengagement in real-world hands-free driving.

Objective: Advanced driver assistance systems are increasingly available in consumer vehicles, making the study of drivers' behavioral adaptation and the impact of automation beneficial for driving safety. Concerns over driver's being out-of-the-loop, coupled with known limitations of automation, has led research to focus on time-critical, system-initiated disengagements. This study used real-world data to assess drivers' response to, and recovery from, automation-initiated disengagements by quantifying changes in visual attention, vehicle control, and time to steady-state behaviors.

Interdependence of driver and pedestrian behavior in naturalistic roadway negotiations.

Objective: This paper characterizes the actions of pedestrian-driver dyads by examining their interdependence across intersection types (e.g., zebra crossings, stop signs).

Characterizing driver speeding behavior when using partial-automation in real-world driving.

Speeding is a prevalent and complex risky behavior that can be affected by many factors. Understanding how drivers speed is important for developing countermeasures, especially as new automation features emerge. The current study seeks to identify and describe types of real-world speeding behaviors with and without the use of partial-automation.

Speeding behavior while using adaptive cruise control and lane centering in free flow traffic.

Objective: Adaptive cruise control (ACC) and lane centering are usually marketed as convenience features but may also serve a safety purpose. However, given that speeding is associated with increased crash risk and worse crash outcomes, the extent to which driver's speed using ACC may reduce the maximum safety benefit they can obtain from this system. The current study was conducted to characterize speeding behavior among drivers using adaptive cruise control and a similar system with added lane centering.

A model for naturalistic glance behavior around Tesla Autopilot disengagements.

Objective: We present a model for visual behavior that can simulate the glance pattern observed around driver-initiated, non-critical disengagements of Tesla's Autopilot (AP) in naturalistic highway driving.

Background: Drivers may become inattentive when using partially-automated driving systems. The safety effects associated with inattention are unknown until we have a quantitative reference on how visual behavior changes with automation.

Driver behavior and the use of automation in real-world driving.

Background: The emergence of partial-automation in consumer vehicles is reshaping the driving task, the driver role, and subsequent driver behavior. When using partial-automation, drivers delegate the operational control of the dynamic driving task to the automation system, while remaining responsible for monitoring, object/event detection, response selection, and execution. Hence, driving has become a collaboration between driver and automation systems that is characterized by dynamic Transfers of Control (TOC).

Patterns in transitions of visual attention during baseline driving and during interaction with visual-manual and voice-based interfaces.

Voice interfaces reduce visual demand compared with visual-manual interfaces, but the extent depends on design. This study compared visual demand during baseline driving with driving while using voice or manual inputs to place calls with Chevrolet MyLink, Volvo Sensus, or a smartphone. Mean glance duration and total eyes-off-road-time increased when using manual input compared with baseline driving; only eyes off road time increased with voice input.

Unsupervised fNIRS feature extraction with CAE and ESN autoencoder for driver cognitive load classification.

. Understanding the cognitive load of drivers is crucial for road safety. Brain sensing has the potential to provide an objective measure of driver cognitive load.

Glanceable, legible typography over complex backgrounds.

Modern digital interfaces display typeface in ways new to the 500 year old art of typography, driving a shift in reading from primarily long-form to increasingly short-form. In safety-critical settings, such at-a-glance reading competes with the need to understand the environment. To keep both type and the environment legible, a variety of 'middle layer' approaches are employed.

The great typography bake-off: comparing legibility at-a-glance.

Typography plays an increasingly important role in today's dynamic digital interfaces. Graphic designers and interface engineers have more typographic options than ever before. Sorting through this maze of design choices can be a daunting task.

Rapid holistic perception and evasion of road hazards.

How quickly can a driver perceive a critical hazard on or near the road? Evidence from vision research suggests that static scene perception is fast and holistic, but does this apply in dynamic road environments? Understanding how quickly drivers can perceive hazards in moving scenes is essential because it improves driver safety now, and will enable autonomous vehicles to work safely with drivers in the future. This paper describes a new, publicly available set of videos, the Road Hazard Stimuli, and a study assessing how quickly participants in the laboratory can detect and correctly respond to briefly presented hazards in them. We performed this laboratory experiment with a group of younger (20-25 years) and older (55-69 years) drivers, and found that while both groups only required brief views of the scene, older drivers required significantly longer to both detect (220 ms, younger; 403 ms, older) and correctly respond to hazards (388 ms younger; 605 ms older).

Detection of brake lights while distracted: Separating peripheral vision from cognitive load.

Drivers rarely focus exclusively on driving, even with the best of intentions. They are distracted by passengers, navigation systems, smartphones, and driver assistance systems. Driving itself requires performing simultaneous tasks, including lane keeping, looking for signs, and avoiding pedestrians.

Predicting road scenes from brief views of driving video.

If a vehicle is driving itself and asks the driver to take over, how much time does the driver need to comprehend the scene and respond appropriately? Previous work on natural-scene perception suggests that observers quickly acquire the gist, but gist-level understanding may not be sufficient to enable action. The moving road environment cannot be studied with static images alone, and safe driving requires anticipating future events. We performed two experiments to examine how quickly subjects could perceive the road scenes they viewed and make predictions based on their mental representations of the scenes.

The relative impact of smartwatch and smartphone use while driving on workload, attention, and driving performance.

The impact of using a smartwatch to initiate phone calls on driver workload, attention, and performance was compared to smartphone visual-manual (VM) and auditory-vocal (AV) interfaces. In a driving simulator, 36 participants placed calls using each method. While task time and number of glances were greater for AV calling on the smartwatch vs.

The effects of visual crowding, text size, and positional uncertainty on text legibility at a glance.

Reading at a glance, once a relatively infrequent mode of reading, is becoming common. Mobile interaction paradigms increasingly dominate the way in which users obtain information about the world, which often requires reading at a glance, whether from a smartphone, wearable device, or in-vehicle interface. Recent research in these areas has shown that a number of factors can affect text legibility when words are briefly presented in isolation.

Investigating the correspondence between driver head position and glance location.

The relationship between a driver's glance orientation and corresponding head rotation is highly complex due to its nonlinear dependence on the individual, task, and driving context. This paper presents expanded analytic detail and findings from an effort that explored the ability of head pose to serve as an estimator for driver gaze by connecting head rotation data with manually coded gaze region data using both a statistical analysis approach and a predictive (i.e.

How safe is tuning a radio?: using the radio tuning task as a benchmark for distracted driving.

Drivers engage in non-driving tasks while driving, such as interactions entertainment systems. Studies have identified glance patterns related to such interactions, and manual radio tuning has been used as a reference task to set an upper bound on the acceptable demand of interactions. Consequently, some view the risk associated with radio tuning as defining the upper limit of glance measures associated with visual-manual in-vehicle activities.

More than the Useful Field: Considering peripheral vision in driving.

Applied research on driving and basic vision research have held similar views on central, fovea-based vision as the core of visual perception. In applied work, the concept of the Useful Field, as determined by the Useful Field of View (UFOV) test, divides vision between a "useful" region towards the center of the visual field, and the rest of the visual field. While compelling, this dichotomization is at odds with findings in vision science which demonstrate the capabilities of peripheral vision.

Glass half-full: On-road glance metrics differentiate crashes from near-crashes in the 100-Car data.

Background: Much of the driver distraction and inattention work to date has focused on concerns over drivers removing their eyes from the forward roadway to perform non-driving-related tasks, and its demonstrable link to safety consequences when these glances are timed at inopportune moments. This extensive literature has established, through the analyses of glance from naturalistic datasets, a clear relationship between eyes-off-road, lead vehicle closing kinematics, and near-crash/crash involvement.

Objective: This paper looks at the role of driver expectation in influencing drivers' decisions about when and for how long to remove their eyes from the forward roadway in an analysis that consider the combined role of on- and off-road glances.

Age-related differences in the legibility of degraded text.

Aging-related changes in the visual system diminish the capacity to perceive the world with the ease and fidelity younger adults are accustomed to. Among many consequences of this, older adults find that text that they could once read easily proves difficult to read, even with sufficient acuity correction. Building on previous work examining visual factors in legibility, we examine potential causes for these age-related effects in the absence of other ocular pathology.

Effects of ambient illumination, contrast polarity, and letter size on text legibility under glance-like reading.

Recent research on the legibility of digital displays has demonstrated a "positive polarity advantage", in which black-on-white text configurations are more legible than their negative polarity, white-on-black counterparts. Existing research in this area suggests that the positive polarity advantage stems from the brighter illumination emitted by positive polarity displays, as opposed to the darker backgrounds of negative polarity displays. In the present study, legibility thresholds were measured under glance-like reading conditions using a lexical decision paradigm, testing two type sizes, display polarities, and ambient illuminations (near-dark and daylight-like).

Does order matter? Investigating the effect of sequence on glance duration during on-road driving.

Previous literature has shown that vehicle crash risks increases as drivers' off-road glance duration increases. Many factors influence drivers' glance duration such as individual differences, driving environment, or task characteristics. Theories and past studies suggest that glance duration increases as the task progresses, but the exact relationship between glance sequence and glance durations is not fully understood.

Utilising psychophysical techniques to investigate the effects of age, typeface design, size and display polarity on glance legibility.

Psychophysical research on text legibility has historically investigated factors such as size, colour and contrast, but there has been relatively little direct empirical evaluation of typographic design itself, particularly in the emerging context of glance reading. In the present study, participants performed a lexical decision task controlled by an adaptive staircase method. Two typefaces, a 'humanist' and 'square grotesque' style, were tested.