Arts & Social Sciences
Te Kura Kete Aronui

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  Driver Perception & Attention

Looming and attention capture in braking responses
2006 Masters' Thesis by H R Terry

Participants selected their preferred following distance (via cruise control). Preceding vehicles subsequently began decelerating (no brake lights illuminated). 

Of interest were the participants’ braking latencies as a function of their speed and the size of the vehicle ahead

The experiment also employed a secondary task condition to examine how the attention-capturing properties of a looming vehicle were affected by driver distraction.

The results indicated that a looming stimulus was capable of redirecting a driver’s attention in a vehicle following task and, as with detection of brake lights, a driver’s detection of a looming vehicle was compromised in the presence of a distracting task.  Increases in vehicle size had the effect of decreasing drivers’ braking latencies.

Performance decrements resulting from the secondary task were reflected in time-to-collision but not in optic expansion rate.

Time-to-collision estimates require explicit cognitive judgements while perception of optic expansion may function in a more automatic fashion to redirect a driver’s attention when cognitive resources are low or collision is imminent.