A simulator evaluation of the effects of attention maintenance training on glance distributions of younger novice drivers inside and outside the vehicle.

Driver distraction inside and outside the vehicle is increasingly a problem, especially for younger drivers. In many cases the distraction is associated with long glances away from the forward roadway. Such glances have been shown to be highly predictive of crashes. Ideally, one would like to develop and evaluate a training program which reduced these long glances. Thus, an experiment was conducted in a driving simulator to test the efficacy of a training program, FOCAL, that was developed to teach novice drivers to limit the duration of glances that are inside the vehicle while performing an in-vehicle task, such as looking for a CD or finding the 4-way flashers. The test in the simulator showed that the FOCAL trained group performed significantly better than the placebo trained group on several measures, notably on the percentage of within-vehicle glances that were greater than 2, 2.5, and 3 s. However, the training did not generalize to glances away from the roadway (e.g., when drivers were asked to attend to a sign adjacent to the roadway, both trained and untrained novice drivers were equally likely to make especially long glances at the sign).

TRANSPOSED LETTER EFFECTS IN PREFIXED WORDS: IMPLICATIONS FOR MORPHOLOGICAL DECOMPOSITION.

A crucial issue in word encoding is whether morphemes are involved in early stages. One paradigm that tests for this employs the transposed letter (TL) effect - the difference in the times to process a word (misfile) when it is preceded by a TL prime (mifsile) and when it is preceded by a substitute letter (SL) prime (mintile) - and examines whether the TL effect is smaller when the two adjacent letters cross a morpheme boundary. The evidence from prior studies is not consistent. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a parafoveal preview paradigm in which the transposed letters either crossed the prefix-stem boundary or did not, and found a clear TL effect regardless of whether the two letters crossed the morpheme boundary. Experiment 3 replicated this finding employing a masked priming lexical-decision paradigm. It thus appears that morphemes are not involved in early processes in English that are sensitive to letter order. There is some evidence for morphemic modulation of the TL effect in other languages; thus, the properties of the language may modulate when morphemes influence early letter position encoding.

Long Term Effects of Hazard Anticipation Training on Novice Drivers Measured on the Open Road.

(a) The purpose of this study was to determine whether novice drivers that were trained to anticipate hazards did so better than novice drivers who were not so trained immediately after training and up to one year after training occurred. (b) Novice drivers who had held their restricted license for about one month were randomly assigned to a PC-based hazard anticipation training program (RAPT) or a placebo (control) training program. The programs took about one hour to complete. The effects of training were assessed in a field drive by using patterns of eye movements to assess whether drivers anticipated a potential unseen hazard. (c) The effects of training persisted over time. In the field test immediately after training, the RAPT group anticipated the hazards 65.8% of the time whereas; the control group anticipated them only 47.3% of the time. Six or more months later, the groups were brought back for a second field test and the effects of training did not diminish; the RAPT group anticipated the hazards 61.9% of the time compared to 37.7% for the control group.

ATTENTION MAINTENANCE IN NOVICE DRIVERS: ASSESSMENT AND TRAINING.

All programs assessing attention maintenance inside the vehicle have required eye trackers and either a driving simulator or a specially equipped field vehicle. Ideally, one would like a way to assess attention maintenance that could be implemented on a desktop PC. Additionally, one would like to have a program that could be used to train novice drivers to maintain their attention more safely on the forward roadway. An experiment was run (a) to determine whether a program FOCAL (Focused Concentration and Attention Learning) using a desktop PC could differentiate between the attention maintenance skills of novice and experienced drivers and (b) to determine whether a program that improved the hazard anticipation skills of novice drivers might also improve their attention maintenance skills. FOCAL was able to differentiate between the attention maintenance skills of novice and experienced drivers. However, hazard anticipation training did not improve the attention maintenance skills of the novice drivers.