Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521, United States.
Accid Anal Prev. 2011 Jan;43(1):381-90. doi: 10.1016/j.aap.2010.09.007. Epub 2010 Nov 1.
The present study examined the limits of spatial attention while performing two driving relevant tasks that varied in depth. The first task was to maintain a fixed headway distance behind a lead vehicle that varied speed. The second task was to detect a light-change target in an array of lights located above the roadway. In Experiment 1 the light detection task required drivers to encode color and location. The results indicated that reaction time to detect a light-change target increased and accuracy decreased as a function of the horizontal location of the light-change target and as a function of the distance from the driver. In a second experiment the light change task was changed to a singleton search (detect the onset of a yellow light) and the workload of the car following task was systematically varied. The results of Experiment 2 indicated that RT increased as a function of task workload, the 2D position of the light-change target and the distance of the light-change target. A multiple regression analysis indicated that the effect of distance on light detection performance was not due to changes in the projected size of the light target. In Experiment 3 we found that the distance effect in detecting a light change could not be explained by the location of eye fixations. The results demonstrate that when drivers attend to a roadway scene attention is limited in three-dimensional space. These results have important implications for developing tests for assessing crash risk among drivers as well as the design of in vehicle technologies such as head-up displays.
本研究考察了在执行两个与驾驶相关的任务时空间注意力的极限，这两个任务的深度不同。第一个任务是保持与前车的固定跟车距离，前车的速度会变化。第二个任务是在位于路面上方的灯光阵列中检测灯光变化的目标。在实验 1 中，灯光检测任务要求驾驶员编码颜色和位置。结果表明，检测灯光变化目标的反应时间随着灯光变化目标的水平位置和与驾驶员的距离的增加而增加，准确性则降低。在第二个实验中，灯光变化任务改为单一搜索（检测黄色灯光的出现），并系统地改变了跟车任务的工作量。实验 2 的结果表明，RT 随着任务工作量、灯光变化目标的 2D 位置和灯光变化目标的距离的增加而增加。多元回归分析表明，距离对灯光检测性能的影响不是由于灯光目标的投影大小的变化引起的。在实验 3 中，我们发现检测灯光变化的距离效应不能用注视点的位置来解释。这些结果表明，当驾驶员关注道路场景时，注意力在三维空间中是有限的。这些结果对于开发评估驾驶员碰撞风险的测试以及设计抬头显示器等车内技术具有重要意义。
