Digital clock drawing test reflects visuospatial ability of older drivers.

Objectives: To keep older drivers safe, it is necessary to assess their fitness to drive. We developed a touch screen-based digital Clock Drawing Test (dCDT) and examined the relationship between the dCDT scores and on-road driving performance of older drivers in a community-setting.

Methods: One hundred and forty-one community-dwelling older drivers (range; 64-88 years old) who participated in this study were included in the analysis.

Effects of cell phone presence on the control of visual attention during the Navon task.

Background: Although cell phones can provide great convenience to our lives, research has shown that they can also affect our behavior, even when not in use. It seems that having a cell phone nearby may not be ideal when the user needs to concentrate on work. However, little is known about whether cell phone presence specifically impairs attentional control.

The Impact of Enhancing Phone Activeness on the Negative Effect Induced by the Presence of a Cell Phone.

In the information-driven workplace, cell phones have gradually become irreplaceable. Although the use of work-related cell phones can bring convenience, recent research has demonstrated that the presence of a cell phone can impair cognitive task performance by reducing available attentional resources and suggested that the effect of the phone's presence can be influenced by phone-related factors. This study focused on the relationship between this effect and phone activeness and conducted two experiments to investigate whether increasing phone activeness is associated with a stronger effect from the phone's presence by using a dual-task paradigm (primary: letter recognition task, secondary: luminance-change detection task).

Effects of the presence of a cell phone and exposure to natural environments on remote associates task performance.

In today's advanced information society, creativity in work is highly valued, and there is growing interest in the kinds of work environments that produce more creative outcomes. Recent researchers have demonstrated that when environmental factors change a worker's attentional state to a diffused state, the worker has access to more information than usual, which can contribute to creativity. Here, we examined whether manipulating environmental factors (the presence of a cell phone and exposure to natural environment) that could affect such attention states would improve performance on the Remote Associates Task, a measure of creativity.

Perceptual and cognitive processes in augmented reality - comparison between binocular and monocular presentations.

In the present study, we investigated the difference between monocular augmented reality (AR) and binocular AR in terms of perception and cognition by using a task that combines the flanker task with the oddball task. A right- or left-facing arrowhead was presented as a central stimulus at the central vision, and participants were instructed to press a key only when the direction in which the arrowhead faced was a target. In a small number of trials, arrowheads that were facing in the same or opposite direction (flanker stimuli) were presented beside the central stimulus binocularly or monocularly as an AR image.

Brief and Indirect Exposure to Natural Environment Restores the Directed Attention for the Task.

The mental fatigue elicited by working and studying consumed mental resources, thereby eliciting a declined performance and an increased mental stress. The long-term continuous work and study, which is typical for modern workers and students, can increase mental fatigue and health risks. Previous studies reported that the natural environment (i.

Warmer Environments Increase Implicit Mental Workload Even If Learning Efficiency Is Enhanced.

Climate change is one of the most important issues for humanity. To defuse this problem, it is considered necessary to improve energy efficiency, make energy sources cleaner, and reduce energy consumption in urban areas. The Japanese government has recommended an air conditioner setting of 28°C in summer and 20°C in winter since 2005.

Trusting Other Vehicles' Automatic Emergency Braking Decreases Self-Protective Driving.

Objective: We focused on drivers in close proximity to vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). We examined whether the belief that an approaching vehicle is equipped with automatic emergency braking (AEB) influences behavior of those drivers.

Background: In addition to benefits of ADAS, previous studies have demonstrated negative behavioral adaptation, that is, behavioral changes after introduction of ADAS, by its users.

Monocular Presentation Attenuates Change Blindness During the Use of Augmented Reality.

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology in which information is superimposed onto the real world directly in front of observers. AR images may behave as distractors because they are inside the observer's field of view and may cause observers to overlook important information in the real world. This kind of overlooking of events or objects is known as "change blindness.

Effect of fixation point distances on allocation of attention in real three-dimensional space.

Although variation in spatial relations between observer and objects is important when attention functions in three-dimensional space, the effects of changes in spatial relations on attention in real three-dimensional space are still unclear. In Exp. 1, the effects of varying distances of the fixation point on attention in a spatial cuing paradigm were investigated.