Departamento de Psicología Experimental y Fisiología del Comportamiento, Universidad de Granada, Campus Cartuja s/n, 18011 Granada, Spain.
Appl Ergon. 2012 Jan;43(1):81-8. doi: 10.1016/j.apergo.2011.03.010. Epub 2011 Apr 22.
This research aims to analyse how drivers integrate the information provided by traffic signs with their general goals (i.e. where they want to go). Some previous studies have evaluated the comparative advantages of obligatory and prohibitory traffic signs using a judgement task. In this work, a new experimental task with greater similarity to driving situations is proposed. Participants imagine they are driving a vehicle and must make right or left turn manoeuvres according to a previously indicated objective and the information from obligatory and prohibitory traffic signs. Eighty-two participants took part in two different experiments. According to the results, an obligatory traffic sign is associated with faster and more accurate responses only when the participant's initial objective is allowed. When the initial objective was not allowed, an advantage in accuracy was observed with prohibitory traffic signs and there was no significant difference in reaction time between the two types of sign. These results suggest that having an obligatory traffic sign may facilitate a correct response when the driver's goal is effectively allowed, whereas a prohibitory traffic sign could be more effective in preventing error when the driver has a not-allowed goal in mind. However, processing a prohibitory sign requires an extra inference (i.e. deciding which is the allowed manoeuvre), and thus the potential advantage in reaction time of the prohibitory sign may disappear. A second experiment showed that the results could not be explained by a potential congruency effect between the location (left or right) of the road signs and the position of the key or the hand used to respond (such as the Simon effect or the spatial Stroop effect). Also, an increase in the difficulty of the task (using an incongruent hand to respond) affected performance more strongly in experimental conditions that required making inferences. This made the advantage of the obligatory sign over the prohibitory sign in this condition more noteworthy. The evidence gathered in the current study could be of particular interest in some applied research areas, such as the assessment of road traffic signalling strategies or the ergonomic design of GPS navigation systems.
本研究旨在分析驾驶员如何将交通标志提供的信息与他们的总体目标（即他们想去的地方）结合起来。一些先前的研究已经使用判断任务评估了强制性和禁止性交通标志的相对优势。在这项工作中，提出了一种与驾驶情况更相似的新实验任务。参与者想象自己正在驾驶车辆，根据先前指示的目标和强制性和禁止性交通标志的信息，必须进行右转或左转操作。82 名参与者参加了两个不同的实验。根据结果，只有当参与者的初始目标被允许时，强制性交通标志才与更快、更准确的反应相关联。当初始目标不被允许时，禁止性交通标志在准确性上具有优势，并且两种类型的标志之间的反应时间没有显著差异。这些结果表明，当驾驶员的目标有效允许时，强制性交通标志可能有助于正确响应，而当驾驶员心中有不允许的目标时，禁止性交通标志可能更有效地防止错误。然而，处理禁止标志需要进行额外的推断（即决定允许的操作），因此禁止标志在反应时间上的潜在优势可能会消失。第二个实验表明，结果不能用道路标志的位置（左或右）与按键或用于响应的手的位置之间的潜在一致性效应（如西蒙效应或空间斯特鲁普效应）来解释。此外，任务难度的增加（使用不匹配的手进行响应）在需要进行推断的实验条件下对性能的影响更大。这使得在这种情况下，强制性标志相对于禁止性标志的优势更加显著。当前研究中收集的证据在某些应用研究领域可能特别感兴趣，例如道路交通信号策略的评估或 GPS 导航系统的人体工程学设计。
