Measuring drivers’ visual information needs during braking: A simulator study using a screen-occlusion method

It is commonly accepted that vision plays an important role in car braking, but it is unknown how people brake in the absence of visual information. In this simulator study, we measured drivers’ braking behaviour while they had to stop their car at designated positions on the road. The access to visual information was manipulated by occluding...

Should drivers be operating within an automation-free bandwidth?: Evaluating haptic steering support systems with different levels of authority

Objective: The aim of this study was to compare continuous versus bandwidth haptic steering guidance in terms of lane-keeping behavior, aftereffects, and satisfaction. Background: An important human factors question is whether operators should be supported continuously or only when tolerance limits are exceeded. We aimed to clarify this issue...

The relationship between tweets, citations, and article views for PLOS ONE articles

An analysis of article-level metrics of 27,856 PLOS ONE articles reveals that the number of tweets was weakly associated with the number of citations (β = 0.10), and weakly negatively associated with citations when the number of article views was held constant (β = −0.06). The number of tweets was predictive of other social media activity (β = 0...

Road-departure prevention in an emergency obstacle avoidance situation

This paper presents a driving simulator experiment, which evaluates a road-departure prevention (RDP) system in an emergency situation. Two levels of automation are evaluated: 1) haptic feedback (HF) where the RDP provides advisory steering torque such that the human and the machine carry out the maneuver cooperatively, and 2) drive by wire (DBW...

The expansion of Google Scholar versus Web of Science: a longitudinal study

Web of Science (WoS) and Google Scholar (GS) are prominent citation services with distinct indexing mechanisms. Comprehensive knowledge about the growth patterns of these two citation services is lacking. We analyzed the development of citation counts in WoS and GS for two classic articles and 56 articles from diverse research fields, making a...

Effects of adaptive cruise control and highly automated driving on workload and situation awareness: A review of the empirical evidence

Adaptive cruise control (ACC), a driver assistance system that controls longitudinal motion, has been introduced in consumer cars in 1995. A next milestone is highly automated driving (HAD), a system that automates both longitudinal and lateral motion. We investigated the effects of ACC and HAD on drivers’ workload and situation awareness...

Vertical field of view restriction in driver training: A simulator-based evaluation

The young driver problem requires remedial measures against speeding and overconfidence. Previous research has shown that increasing the task difficulty during training can enhance subsequent retention performance and prevent overconfidence. In this driving simulator study, we evaluated the training effectiveness of vertical field of view...

Social desirability is the same in offline, online, and paper surveys: A meta-analysis

The aim of this meta-analysis was to compare social desirability scores between paper and computer surveys. Subgroup analyses were conducted with Internet connectivity, level of anonymity, individual or group test setting, possibility of skipping items, possibility of backtracking previous items, inclusion of questions of sensitive nature, and...

Why person models are important for human factors science

Human factors science has always been concerned with explaining and preventing human error and accidents. In the past 100 years, the field has shifted focus from a person approach to a system approach. In this opinion article, I provide five reasons why this shift is not opportune, and why person models are important for human factors science. I...

Controversy in human factors constructs and the explosive use of the NASA-TLX: A measurement perspective

Situation awareness and workload are popular constructs in human factors science. It has been hotly debated whether these constructs are scientifically credible, or whether they should merely be seen as folk models. Reflecting on the works of psychophysicist Stanley Smith Stevens and of measurement theorist David Hand, we suggest a resolution to...

Enhancing driver car-following performance with a distance and acceleration display

A car-following assisting system named the rear window notification display (RWND) was developed, with the aim of improving a driver's manual car-following performance. The RWND presented lead-car acceleration and time headway (THW) (i.e., intervehicle distance divided by the speed of the following car) on the rear window of a lead car, which...

Predicting self-reported violations among novice license drivers using pre-license simulator measures

Novice drivers are overrepresented in crash statistics and there is a clear need for remedial measures. Driving simulators allow for controlled and objective measurement of behavior and might therefore be a useful tool for predicting whether someone will commit deviant driving behaviors on the roads. However, little is currently known about the...

Small sample sizes, overextraction, and unrealistic expectations: A commentary on M. Mattsson

In a recent article about the Manchester Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ), Mattsson (2012) concluded that the factor structure was not invariant across subgroups of respondents. This commentary contests this conclusion.

Using the Student’s t-test with extremely small sample sizes

Researchers occasionally have to work with an extremely small sample size, defined herein as N ≤ 5. Some methodologists have cautioned against using the t-test when the sample size is extremely small, whereas others have suggested that using the t-test is feasible in such a case. The present simulation study estimated the Type I error rate and...