Investigating Implicit and Explicit Communication of Highly Automated Vehicles in Japan: How do Light-band eHMIs affect Pedestrians' Willingness to Cross, Trust and Perceived Safety?

In the near future, pedestrians will face highly automated vehicles on the roads. Highly automated vehicles (HAVs) should have safety-enhancing communication tools to guarantee traffic safety, e.g.

Analysis of Local Track Discontinuities and Defects in Railway Switches Based on Track-Side Accelerations.

Switches are an essential, safety-critical part of the railway infrastructure. Compared to open tracks, their complex geometry leads to increased dynamic loading on the track superstructure from passing trains, resulting in high maintenance costs. To increase efficiency, condition monitoring methods specific to railway switches are required.

The Novelty Appraisal of the Feeling of Risk in Vehicles.

Nowadays, vehicle assistance systems may assess the risks of the traffic situation with the help of advanced sensor technology and optimized algorithms. However, the passengers' feelings of risk in the vehicle have been mostly neglected. According to the Component Process Model of emotions, during the feeling of risk, novelty is one of the relevant event appraisals leading to particular physiological and facial responses.

Toward a Holistic Communication Approach to an Automated Vehicle's Communication With Pedestrians: Combining Vehicle Kinematics With External Human-Machine Interfaces for Differently Sized Automated Vehicles.

Future automated vehicles (AVs) of different sizes will share the same space with other road users, e. g., pedestrians.

Analysis of Implicit Communication of Motorists and Cyclists in Intersection Using Video and Trajectory Data.

The interaction of automated vehicles with vulnerable road users is one of the greatest challenges in the development of automated driving functions (ADF). In order to improve efficiency and ensure the safety of mixed traffic, ADF need to understand the intention of vulnerable road users, to adapt to their driving behavior, and to show its intention. However, this communication may occur in an implicit way, meaning they may communicate with vulnerable road users by using dynamic information, such as speed, distance, etc.

Potential of auxiliary strobe lights on train locomotives to improve level crossing safety.

Inattentiveness of road users on approach to passive railway crossings represents a major threat to level crossing safety. An auxiliary strobe light system installed on trains in addition to existing headlights may help address this issue by providing an ergonomic way of attracting human attention to the level crossing and to the train. The objective of this paper was to investigate the ergonomics and safety potential of auxiliary strobe light systems.

One Solution Fits All? Evaluating Different Communication Strategies of a Light-based External Human-Machine Interface for Differently Sized Automated Vehicles from a Pedestrian's Perspective.

Differently sized automated vehicles (AVs) will enter the roads of tomorrow and will interact with other road users. Pedestrians as vulnerable road users heavily rely on the communication with other road users, especially for the interaction with larger vehicles, as miscommunication pose a high risk. Therefore, AVs need to provide communication abilities to safely interact with pedestrians.

Shared mobility services: an accessibility assessment from the perspective of people with disabilities.

Introduction: Shared on-demand mobility services emerge at a fast pace, changing the landscape of public transport. However, shared mobility services are largely designed without considering the access needs of people with disabilities, putting these passengers at risk of exclusion. Recognising that accessibility is best addressed at the design stage and through direct participation of persons with disabilities, the objective of this study was to explore disabled users' views on the following emerging shared mobility services: (a) ride pooling, (b) microtransit, (c) motorbike taxis, (d) robotaxis, (f) e-scooter sharing, and (g) bike sharing.

Online risk estimation of critical and non-critical interactions between right-turning motorists and crossing cyclists by a decision tree.

One of the most critical situations in urban areas is when motorists turn right in an intersection and cyclists cross the road. Many of those crashes result in severe consequences for cyclists. In order to increase the safety of cyclists, especially in the case of conflicts with right-turning vehicles, an online infrastructure-based assistance system may be a promising solution warning drivers and cyclists when a conflict or crash is predicted.

Reliability and validity of a 3-min psychomotor vigilance task in assessing sensitivity to sleep loss and alcohol: fitness for duty in aviation and transportation.

Study Objectives: The psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) is a widely used objective method to measure sustained attention, but the standard 10-min version is often impractical in operational settings. We investigated the reliability and validity of a 3-min PVT administered on a portable handheld device assessing sensitivity to sleep loss and alcohol in relation to a 10-min PVT and to applied tasks.

Methods: A total of 47 healthy volunteers underwent a 12 consecutive days sleep lab protocol.

Climate network approach reveals the modes of CO concentration to surface air temperature.

Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO) is expected to be the main factor of global warming. The relation between CO concentrations and surface air temperature (SAT) has been found related to Rossby waves based on a multi-layer complex network approach. However, the significant relations between CO and SAT occur in the South Hemisphere that is not that much influenced by human activities may offer not enough information to formulate targeted carbon reduction policies.

Understanding the Multidimensional and Dynamic Nature of Facial Expressions Based on Indicators for Appraisal Components as Basis for Measuring Drivers' Fear.

Facial expressions are one of the commonly used implicit measurements for the in-vehicle affective computing. However, the time courses and the underlying mechanism of facial expressions so far have been barely focused on. According to the Component Process Model of emotions, facial expressions are the result of an individual's appraisals, which are supposed to happen in sequence.

A mixed-methods analysis of mobility behavior changes in the COVID-19 era in a rural case study.

Background: As a reaction to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), countries around the globe have implemented various measures to reduce the spread of the virus. The transportation sector is particularly affected by the pandemic situation. The current study aims to contribute to the empirical knowledge regarding the effects of the coronavirus situation on the mobility of people by (1) broadening the perspective to the mobility rural area's residents and (2) providing subjective data concerning the perceived changes of affected persons' mobility practices, as these two aspects have scarcely been considered in research so far.

An Integrated Approach for Assessing the Impact of Large-Scale Future Floods on a Highway Transport System.

The negative impact of climate change continues to escalate flood risk. Floods directly and indirectly damage highway systems and disturb the socioeconomic order. In this study, we propose an integrated approach to quantitatively assess how floods impact the functioning of a highway system.

Alexithymia and automatic processing of facial emotions: behavioral and neural findings.

Background: Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by difficulties identifying and describing feelings, an externally oriented style of thinking, and a reduced inclination to imagination. Previous research has shown deficits in the recognition of emotional facial expressions in alexithymia and reductions of brain responsivity to emotional stimuli. Using an affective priming paradigm, we investigated automatic perception of facial emotions as a function of alexithymia at the behavioral and neural level.

German bike messengers' experiences and expressions of cycling anger.

The present study has 3 objectives: First, we wanted to examine whether the Cycling Anger Scale (CAS) applies to German professional bike messengers, because this scale was previously developed with nonprofessional cyclists in Germany. Second, we wanted to look at possible differences in cycling anger experience and expression between professional German bike messengers and nonprofessional German cyclists. Third, we explored whether cycling anger is somehow related to driving anger and general anger.

Driving anger expression in Germany-Validation of the Driving Anger Expression Inventory for German drivers.

Objective: The main objective of this article is to examine whether the Driving Anger Expression Inventory (DAX) applies to German drivers because this scale has previously been given to drivers in many different countries.

Methods: We applied German versions of the DAX, the Driving Anger Scale (DAS), and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) to a sample of 501 German drivers. We computed confirmatory factor analysis and principal axis factoring (PAF) analysis to examine the structure of driving anger expression in Germany.

Demonstrating Brain-Level Interactions Between Visuospatial Attentional Demands and Working Memory Load While Driving Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Driving is a complex task concurrently drawing on multiple cognitive resources. Yet, there is a lack of studies investigating interactions at the brain-level among different driving subtasks in dual-tasking. This study investigates how visuospatial attentional demands related to increased driving difficulty interacts with different working memory load (WML) levels at the brain level.

Corrigendum: Assessing the Driver's Current Level of Working Memory Load With High Density Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy: A Realistic Driving Simulator Study.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.

Recognizing Frustration of Drivers From Face Video Recordings and Brain Activation Measurements With Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Experiencing frustration while driving can harm cognitive processing, result in aggressive behavior and hence negatively influence driving performance and traffic safety. Being able to automatically detect frustration would allow adaptive driver assistance and automation systems to adequately react to a driver's frustration and mitigate potential negative consequences. To identify reliable and valid indicators of driver's frustration, we conducted two driving simulator experiments.

Scaling tunable network model to reproduce the density-driven superlinear relation.

Previous works have shown the universality of allometric scaling under total and density values at the city level, but our understanding of the size effects of regions on the universality of allometric scaling remains inadequate. Here, we revisit the scaling relations between the gross domestic production (GDP) and the population based on the total and density values and first reveal that the allometric scaling under density values for different regions is universal. The scaling exponent β under the density value is in the range of (1.

Volumetric Associations Between Amygdala, Nucleus Accumbens, and Socially Anxious Tendencies in Healthy Women.

Socially anxious individuals report higher social fears and feelings of distress in interpersonal interactions. Structural neuroimaging studies indicate brain morphological abnormalities in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD), but findings are heterogeneous and partially discrepant. Studies on structural correlates of socially anxious tendencies in participants without clinical diagnoses are scarce.

Assessing the Driver's Current Level of Working Memory Load with High Density Functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy: A Realistic Driving Simulator Study.

Cognitive overload or underload results in a decrease in human performance which may result in fatal incidents while driving. We envision that driver assistive systems which adapt their functionality to the driver's cognitive state could be a promising approach to reduce road accidents due to human errors. This research attempts to predict variations of cognitive working memory load levels in a natural driving scenario with multiple parallel tasks and to reveal predictive brain areas.

Does assisted driving behavior lead to safety-critical encounters with unequipped vehicles' drivers?

With Intelligent Transport Systems (e.g., traffic light assistance systems) assisted drivers are able to show driving behavior in anticipation of upcoming traffic situations.