Exploring hazard anticipation and stress while driving in light of defensive behavior theory.

In driving, poor hazard anticipation would provide drivers less time to prepare an appropriate response, increasing the urgency of the situation and generating more stress. Assuming this, the current study seeks to determine whether a predictable road hazard triggers hazard anticipation in drivers that can mitigate the ensuing stress response, and whether the stress response is influenced by driving experience. In a simulated road environment, a cue was used to trigger hazard anticipation, and a road hazard to induce a stress response.

Detecting driver stress and hazard anticipation using real-time cardiac measurement: A simulator study.

Objectives: In the context of growing interest in real-time driver stress detection systems, we question the value of using heart rate change over short time periods to detect driver stress and hazard anticipation.

Methods: To this end, we explored changes in heart rate and speed as well as perceived stress in 27 drivers in a driving simulator. Driver stress was triggered by using hazardous road events, while hazard anticipation was manipulated using three levels of hazard predictability: unpredictable (U), predictable (P), and predictable and familiar (PF).

Sensitivity of Physiological Measures of Acute Driver Stress: A Meta-Analytic Review.

The link between driving performance impairment and driver stress is well-established. Identifying and understanding driver stress is therefore of major interest in terms of safety. Although many studies have examined various physiological measures to identify driver stress, none of these has as yet been definitively confirmed as offering definitive all-round validity in practice.

The Reactivation of Motion influences Size Categorization in a Visuo-Haptic Illusion.

People simulate themselves moving when they view a picture, read a sentence, or simulate a situation that involves motion. The simulation of motion has often been studied in conceptual tasks such as language comprehension. However, most of these studies investigated the direct influence of motion simulation on tasks inducing motion.

Haptic modality takes its time: Dynamic of activations of sensory modalities in perceptual and memory processes.

Based on claims resulting from grounded cognition theory that perceptual and memory processes are using the same distributed systems, the present study investigated the temporal aspect of access to memory traces through haptic and auditory modalities. Unlike in the case of visual or auditory components, the perception of a vibrotactile component is more sequential in nature and therefore cannot be fully processed before the end of the signal. The present study explores the dynamic of components activation in a situation of audio-vibrotactile asynchrony.

"The mask who wasn't there": visual masking effect with the perceptual absence of the mask.

Does a visual mask need to be perceptually present to disrupt processing? In the present research, we proposed to explore the link between perceptual and memory mechanisms by demonstrating that a typical sensory phenomenon (visual masking) can be replicated at a memory level. Experiment 1 highlighted an interference effect of a visual mask on the categorization of auditory targets and confirmed the multimodal nature of knowledge. In Experiment 2, we proposed to reactivate this mask in a categorization task on visual targets.