The Multisensory Driver: Implications for Ergonomic Car Interface Design (Human Factors in Road and Rail Transport) by Cristy Ho & Charles Spence

Author:Cristy Ho & Charles Spence [Ho, Cristy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: 2017-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.4 Summary interactions in the mean reaction time (RT; ms) data between the direction of the cue and the location of the critical visual event in the orthogonal task in Experiments 6.2 (A) and 6.3 (B). Percentages of errors are indicated by numerical values in parentheses

The results of Experiment 6.2 show that the presentation of a vibrotactile cue to the front or back of the participant’s torso did not lead to a shift of their spatial attention in the direction cued by the vibration as indexed by a task involving the discrimination of the colour of a numberplate presented far from the participant’s body. It is possible, however, that the vibrotactile cues might have resulted in our participants’ attention being oriented toward the source of stimulation on their torso (i.e., toward peripersonal space; see Kitagawa, Zampini, and Spence, 2005; Kitagawa and Spence, 2006; Tassinari and Campara, 1996), rather than to the extrapersonal visual space outside the car (as seen through the windscreen or rearview mirror). Previous research has shown that crossmodal spatial cuing effects are maximal when the cue and target are presented from the same spatial location, and decline as the cue-target separation increases (Spence et al., 2004). Note that this contrasts with the case of response priming, where as long as the cue primes the appropriate response, it does not really seem to matter so much what the exact spatial relationship between the cue and target is; see Chapter 7 on this point). Indeed, recent neuropsychological research with people suffering from unilateral spatial extinction (these people fail to perceive or respond to stimuli in the space contralateral/opposite to their brain damage) has shown far more pronounced interactions between pairs of stimuli when they are both presented within the same region of space (i.e., both within peripersonal space or both within just extrapersonal space) than when they occur in different functional regions of space (i.e., one in peripersonal space and the other in extrapersonal space; e.g., Làdavas, 2002). Such results have been taken to show that the brain represents stimuli originating in these two regions of space in a somewhat distinct manner (cf. Previc, 1998, 2000; see also Holmes and Spence, 2006).

Given that vibrotactile cues can only be presented on the body surface itself (i.e., in near-peripersonal space), Experiment 6.3 was designed to investigate whether the presentation of spatially-predictive auditory warning signals from the same functional region of space as the target visual driving events (i.e., when both events were presented in extrapersonal space) would facilitate performance on the numberplate colour discrimination task for targets presented from the cued location. (Note that both the rear auditory and visual stimuli originated from the rear, despite the fact that the targets were visually inspected from in front via the rearview mirror.)

The participants in Experiment 6.3 were found to respond significantly more rapidly to target visual driving events (the sudden change in the colour of a car’s numberplate) occurring in the same direction as the auditory warning signal than when they were presented from opposite directions (see Figure 6.

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