GPS devices, automation, and creepy men with chainsaws

I have been totally reliant on my GPS since I got to Rhode Island, and it has been mostly reliable. There have been a couple of errors, but nothing too drastic. Coming back from nearby Whole Foods last night, however, nearly gave me a panic attack. The route given to me by my GPS took me through a dark industrial park, past dimly lit residential areas, a giant warehouse with big loading docks, and a construction zone with a recently leveled building.

Did the GPS get me home? Yes. Did it take the shortest route? Yes. Did I have no choice but to fully trust the automation and hope that I wouldn’t encounter creepy men with chainsaws? Yes.

Automation is a wonderful thing, but it is distressing to be at the mercy of a machine. Yet, in many ideal futures, our cars drive for us so we don’t have to do any work. Except worry about creepy man with chainsaws.

Thankfully, there has been a lot of research on automation in the human factors literature. Much of the research examines how humans trust automation and how automation use changes after a failure. One of the better review articles is:

Parasuraman, R. & Riley, V. (1997). Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse. Human Factors, 39(2), 230-253. (link)

Cognitive Psychology: The Early Years.

It’s 1967, and you want to study the difficult task of driving. But you don’t have fancy simulators or computer screens. Instead, you have a real car and some engineering knowledge. What do you do? Go full scale and run an experiment that periodically obstructs your view of the road ON THE HIGHWAY:

Thanks to Matt Peterson and http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/cogworks/?view=modules.misc.senders for this!

NASCAR: The necessity of top-notch vision.

So you’re driving down a racetrack at 200 mph. Things are flying past you at phenomenal speed, and you need to make sense of it all. Do you need spectacular vision? Sure. But it’s not just acuity (how good your vision where your visual focus is) that matters. What also matters is how well you can process things in the periphery. From an article about Nascar driver Tony Stewart in the New York Times:

For starters, Stewart has superb eyesight — 20/13 in one eye, 20/15 in the other — but it’s not visual acuity that matters so much as a driver’s ability to process everything that drifts into his periphery while he travels at 200 m.p.h. “A driver has to know what’s unfolding in front of him at a rate of a football field a second,” says Dr. Stephen Olvey, a founding fellow of the F.I.A. Institute for Motor Sport Safety.

When there is so much optic flow (a technical term meaning “stuff passing you as you are in motion”) is occurring, it makes sense that you have to be able to deal with something that suddenly appears in your peripheral vision, like another car, debris, or the wall. But not only do you have to detect that event, but you also have to react to it. You need to make a saccadic eye movement to bring the event from the periphery into the fovea - the small portion of central vision where acuity is the best.

A normal person can make a saccade within 250 ms (a rough estimate). That’s one-quarter of a second. 200 mph = 293 feet per second. Therefore, in the time it takes to make a single eye movement, you’ve traveled 73 feet at 200 mph. Add to that the fact that you’re effectively blind during a saccade, and suddenly 73 feet has passed before you know it.

Want to know how good your peripheral vision is? The New York Times article mentioned above has an excellent demonstration to see how good your peripheral vision is and how quickly you can move your eyes And if your performance is not as good as you’d like, you can train like a Nascar champ:

Greg Zipadelli, Stewart’s crew chief, says his driver hones his talent with a popular training tool: PlayStation.

Thanks to John Fedota for the link to the original New York Times article!

From the January 2008 issue of Wired

FOUND: Artifacts of the Future

Or, as I would subtitle it: “A Human Factors Nightmare.”

All kidding and craziness aside, heads-up displays are coming into cars very quickly. Right now, they only display speed. The goal is to put information right in the driver’s field of view to minimize eye movements away from the road, similar to the Honda Civic dashboard. This makes sense from a cognitive perspective, except for one major flaw: people can only pay attention to one depth at a time. Therefore, attention must shifted from the road (relatively far away) to the windshield (much closer) in order to glean necessary information. That still leads to performance problems. What some systems are trying to do is to project the information “into the world” so that the speedometer is still on the windshield but appears on the road, so you don’t have to shift attention in depth. Smart.

Of course, while it’s easy to argue that the dashboard is way too cluttered to make driving safe, complex GPS systems are already part of high-end cars. They can be complicated to use and certainly provide a distraction if they make a mistake. Presumably, you’re driving in unfamiliar territory, and your map breaks, forcing you to fiddle with it?

There is a point of balance, where more information helps the driver drive better or multitask. But this makes human factors research all the more critical to ensure safety at all costs while not making driving an unbearable task.

Return of the two-tiered Civic dashboard

I have mentioned the two-tiered dashboard of my 2008 Civic in this blog before, and I wanted to touch on it one last time. I’ve gotten used to the dual-tiered dashboard, though I have complained about it in the past.

However, this research from Summala, Lamble & Laakso (1998) demonstrates that brake light detection is not so good when attention is focused at the speedometer and is better when focused on a display at the lower portion of the windshield. From the article’s abstract:

Perception of the lead car’s braking was measured on-road when subjects of various levels of driving experience were looking at a digital display located at the lower part of the windscreen, at the speedometer level, or in the mid-console. The brake lights of the lead car were either working normally or switched off. The results indicated that the detection of the lead car’s brake lights, in daylight, is substantially impaired when a following driver is looking at the speedometer area and brake lights do not contribute to detection at all when he/she is looking at a target in the mid-console… 

So peripheral vision is not that great for detecting brake lights when you’re looking down at your speedometer. It is pretty good, though, at the level of the lower windshield, which is where my speedometer is. So I must revise my assessment of the two-tiered Civic dashboard and say that it doesn’t seem to hurt driving performance by being digital instead of analog, and it may even assist with brake light detection. I suppose only an analysis of accident rates between the two types of speedometers will really tell which design is better, but for now, I endorse this new design.