Visual Attention During Driving: Implement Of The Test Of Useful View Of Field

Useful view of field (UFOV) is defined as an area of visual field where information can be extracted from a slutterd scene within a single glance and without a eye or head movements. As a test of functional vision, UFOV tests measure an individual's sensory and cognitive capabilities though focused attention and divided attestation tasks. While performance is believed to reliably assess the likelihood of accidents involvement in older drivers, traditional tests of the UFOV may be limited as they ignored key attention aspects of driving-namely vigilance. This investigation focused on the issue and applied them into new conditions for testing the UFOV. The purpose of this investigation was to explore the effects of the new conditions have on the size on a subject's UFOV. Results showed that incorporating vigilance though the addition of a random onset condition resulted in worth performance in divided attention task. In experiment l,when the response-stimulus-interval(RSI) was randomly varied between 0 second and 9 seconds, the error rate of locating peripheral stimulus under divided attention was lower than that of focused attention. Although the difference is not significant, yet the trend was appeared and this is contrary to the fix onset condition. In experiment 2, the response-stimulus-interval(RSI) was randomly varied between 0 second and 20 seconds, which demanded subjects keeping higher vigilance to task, the error rate of locating peripheral stimulus under divided attention was significantly lower than that of focused attention. This suggested that when RSI randomly varied between 0 and 9seconds or 20 seconds, in the condition of divided attention,the central letter was a cue for subjects detecting the peripheral stimulus, and subjects benefited from the simultaneously appeared central cue, even the validity effect of central cue increased over response-stimulus-interval. In the two experiments, whether in the condition of focused attention or the divided attention, the error rate of locating peripheral stimulus of random onset condition was higher than that of fix onset condition, it suggested that it is more difficult to locate peripheral stimulus in the condition of random onset than in the condition of fix onset. For in the condition of random onset, subjects had to keep high vigilance to the task, it is conjectured that the UFOV score should be close to reality. Traditional test conditions predict how drivers react to planed or predicted events in driving situations, but it may be ignore some key aspects of attention, for example, vigilance, so the new UFOV test condition could be supplements to traditional tests.