The Impact Of Voice Calls On Pedestrians' Ability To Locate Vehicles Based On Auditory Cue

As an important pathway for pedestrians to obtain external traffic information,hearing not only guides and assists vision,but also serves as a separate information channel to obtain traffic scene information.Auditory localization is the behavior of recognizing the orientation of vehicle spatial position,and it is an important process for pedestrians to obtain vehicle information based on auditory perception.The factors affecting vehicle location come from three aspects: vehicle itself,environmental interference factor,pedestrian’s own ability and distraction state.This study suggests that voice calls,as the most basic and common function of mobile phones,may affect pedestrians’ ability to locate vehicles based on auditory cues.In real life,pedestrians holding a cell phone will use either the left or right ear to talk(i.e.,oncoming versus non-oncoming side),which may be the variable regulating the effect of voice calls on vehicle localization;at the theoretical level,the interference mechanism of cell phone calls to pedestrians is unclear and may originate from two perspectives:interference of auditory signals or attentional resource occupation.In addition,in our current road traffic environment,vehicles may be coming from different directions.Therefore,the purpose of Study1 is to investigate the effect of phone calls on pedestrians’ localization of oncoming vehicles in multiple directions and how it affects them,and study 2 will further explore the influence of conversation difficulty on pedestrian location of multiple vehicles based on hearing based on study 1.In the first experiment,the experiment required the subjects to hold a mobile phone and use their left or right ear respectively to simulate daily conversation with the subject,and at the same time,they also needed to complete the task of locating cars coming from different directions.A total of 38 subjects participated in the experiment,and 30 valid data were recovered.The second study considers that the difficulty of communication may also affect pedestrians’ location of vehicles.For more difficult phone calls,pedestrians may occupy more attention resources and perform worse in vehicle location.Therefore,in the laboratory environment,we compared the differences between three difficulty groups(no distraction control group,low difficulty task group and high difficulty task group)to explore the impact of pedestrian voice difficulty on the location of incoming vehicles in different directions.A total of 99 subjects participated in the experiment,and 90 valid data were recovered.By analyzing the data of the two experiments,it is found that:(1)there is no difference in the positioning accuracy between the two directions when pedestrians locate the vehicles coming from left and right,but they will locate the vehicles coming from left faster;(2)phone calls have little impact on vehicle location accuracy,but significantly increase pedestrian location time;(3)There is no difference in the accuracy and remaining time of the pedestrian using the left or the right ear to locate the sound of the coming vehicle;(4)There was no difference in the accuracy of pedestrian locating between different difficulty task groups,but the remaining time of the high difficulty task group was slightly lower than that of the low difficulty task group.Based on the above results,we draw the following conclusions: The vehicle positioning between different directions is influenced by prior experience;phone calls can lead to poor vehicle location performance of pedestrians,and this effect comes from attention resource occupation.The difficulty of the call affects the location of the vehicle by the pedestrian.The more difficult the content of the phone call,the pedestrian may occupy more attention resources,and the performance of the vehicle location is worse..