Orientation Comes First: Becoming Aware of Spatial Disorientation Interferes with Cognitive Performance

Background: Previous research has shown that experiencing motion stimuli negatively impacts cognitive performance. Objective: In the current study, we investigate whether this impact relates to Type-II spatial disorientation (SD), to motion stimulus magnitude, or to an interaction of these factors. Method: Stimuli for participants (n = 23)...

Adaptive lane change assistance: Design and evaluation of a trial-by-trial adaptive lane change assistance system on a motion-based simulator

This study proposes an LCA system that provides haptic guidance during lane changes. This system is fully integrated with LKA functionality to provide continuous lateral support during highway driving. Two different system configurations of this LCA are investigated. One is a generalized LCA that provides lane change reference trajectories based...

The mental machine: Classifying mental workload state from unobtrusive heart rate-measures using machine learning

This paper investigates whether mental workload can be classified in an operator setting using unobtrusive psychophysiological measures. Having reliable predictions of workload using unobtrusive sensors can be useful for adaptive instructional systems, as knowledge of a trainee’s workload can then be used to provide appropriate training level...

Evaluation of a 3D Solution Space-based ATC Workload Metric

Air Traffic Control (ATC) workload is a limiting factor for air traffic growth, creating a need for objective ATC workload metrics. Previous research has shown that the solution space diagram can be a basis for a workload prediction metric. The current solution space metric however, does not incorporate altitude. In this paper, a 3D solution...

Highly automated platooning: Effects on mental workload, stress, and fatigue

Automatically driving platoons of vehicles are a likely candidate for solving many existing issues of road safety and congestion. However, the psychological effects of such technology are yet to be understood. Therefore, by means of a driving simulator experiment, we aimed to assess the psychological effects of driving in a highly automated...

Cross-sector transferability of metrics for air traffic controller workload

Air traffc controller workload is an important impediment to air transport growth. Several approaches exist that aim to better understand the causes for workload, and models have been derived to predict workload in new operational settings. These methods often relate workload to the diffculty, or complexity, that an average controller would have...

Workload Assessment for Mental Arithmetic Tasks using the Task-Evoked Pupillary Response

Pupillometry is a promising method for assessing mental workload and could be helpful in the optimization of systems that involve human-computer interaction. The present study focuses on replicating the pupil diameter study by Ahern (1978) for mental multiplications of varying difficulty, using an automatic remote eye tracker. Our results showed...

Review of eye-related measures of drivers’ mental workload

The assessment of mental workload could be helpful to road safety especially if developments of vehicle automation will increasingly place drivers into roles of supervisory control. With the rapidly decreasing size and increasing resolution of cameras as well as exponential computational power gains, remote eye measurements are growing in...

Assessment of Subjective Workload in Traffic Situations using Video Fragments

Mental workload is an important subject in traffic safety research, however workload measurements are expensive and time intensive. To this end a measurement method is developed which uses short video fragments of driving situations to the subject, after which they are asked about their perceived mental effort if they would be driving through...

Preliminary results from a field experiment on e-bike safety: Speed choice and mental workload for middle-aged and elderly cyclists

To study the safety of e-bikes for the elderly, an experimental field study was conducted, using instrumented bicycles and comparing two age groups: older cyclists, n= 29, mean age = 70, SD = 4.2 and middle-aged cyclists, n = 29, mean age = 38, SD = 4.3. All were regular cyclists. They rode a fixed route with a length of about 3.5 km: once on an...

Psychological elements in car-following models: Mental workload in case of incidents in the other driving lane

Estimations of parameter values of car-following models show considerable differences between individuals and experiments. These differences may be caused by a different effect of external circumstances on mental workload of drivers. This effect may especially play a considerable role in case of driving under adverse conditions (e.g. evacuations...