The Experimental Study Of The Driver's Memory Of Traffic Information Under A Dual-Task Environment

Since the world has entered the information era, there are more and more information for people to process and memorize in their life and work. As an essential part of modern people's memory, the memory of traffic information is not only a hot topic in traffic psychology but also a focus in traffic safety engineering. It is quite common for a driver in real life to bear traffic information in mind while attending to other things. Therefore, the analysis of influence mechanism of traffic information memory under the hypothesis that a driver has to attend to both driving and the other thing (ie. dual-task) could provide important reference for the establishment and improvement of concerned cognitive theory. What's more, the study of attention distribution and memorized information quality in dual-task situation could generate guiding rules for the traffic information designing.This paper is to study the mechanism of traffic information memory under dual-task situation, analyzing how attention is distributed between the two tasks. The experiment, which creates a situation of two totally irrelevant tasks, is based on the experiment scheme by Cahill and McGaugh in 1995, in which the subjects have to do addition by following the orders from a tape, and meanwhile memorize traffic information. Each of the two tasks has no privilege over the other. In the experiment, all the traffic information is shown by slides for three minutes. After that, the subjects are to be tested respectively for their memorization and recognition to review the quality of memorization. Then subjects are divided into two groups according to certain principles. By analyzing the results of memorization level and calculation ability, we have found that the subjects under dual-task situation Moreover, primacy effect and recency effect have been again confirmed. Third, under the dual-task work environment performance of both tasks appeared to be mutually promoted and the attention resource was not simply distributed to each task. Finally, under dual-task situation, people's attention resource distribution was not simply distributed to each task.The experiment study of this paper is an exploration into the field of traffic information memory, providing a preliminary guideline for traffic information designing and bearing certain academic meaning and practical engineering value.