Thursday, January 10

Organizational meeting; Development of class "deliverables": 8 assigned reaction papers and an in-depth literature review paper on topic approved by the professor.

 

Tuesday, January 15

Crash statistics and trends (NHTSA, 2010); crash patterns among older drivers (Cerrelli, 1989).

 

Thursday, January 17

Introduction to traffic engineering; Hierarchical models of driving (Reason/Rassmussen; Michon; more on this later); Perception Reaction Time; AASHTO 2.5 sec rule; Stopping Sight Distance.  Assignment: Johanson & Rumar (1971) reaction paper due 1/22

 

Tuesday, January 22

Traffic engineering continued: models of reaction time; RT = bH+a, where H=log2(N) - information theory and the reduction of uncertainty - quantification by Shannon; RT = PT+MT; disscussion of the Johansson & Rumar paper and its role in the establishment of the AASHTO 2.5 sec PRT design criterion; discussion of the Olson & Sivak (1986) paper. Assignment: Read Ranney (1994) paper; Gugerty (1997) reaction paper due 1/31

 

Thursday, January 24

Braking time and Fitts Law; AASHTO braking distance model; Begin review of psychological theories of driving safety: 3 factors related to crash history (1) perceptual style; (2) complex decision time; (3) attention switching

 

Tuesday, January 29
UFOV preview; Motivational theories of driving: Risk homeostasis vs. Zero-Risk models; Applying information processing theories to driving performance: Multiple Resource Theory; Controlled vs. Automatized processes; Reasons GEMS model in a nutshell. 

 

Thursday, January 31
Situation Awareness framework (ala Endsley); SAGAT vs embedded-task measures of SA; Gugerty's assessment of explicit (SAGAT) vs. implicit (embedded-task performance) SA in a simulated driving context; SA framework helps bridge the gap between the traditional static/discrete/semantic info processing literature and the dynamic/continuous/spatial nature of the driving task.

 

Tuesday, February 5

Eye movements and driving; synopsis of Green (2002) review paper; novice vs. experienced drivers; useful field of view/Miura's data and "rubber band" model of visual attention; USD-IPSCAN2 study.  Assignment: explore mental workload readings; prepare Harms (1991) reaction paper (due February 14).

 

Thursday, February 7

Visual entropy, driving and non-intrusive recording of eye movement data; Eye movements and highway sign reading distances; Assignment: Nakayama (1999) reaction paper (due February 21).

 

Tuesday, February 12

Recarte & Nunes(2000) experiment/technique/results; spectral analysis of steering wheel angular position; approaches to mental workload assessment during driving (see deWaard, 1996).

 

Thursday, February 14

Mental workload assessment during driving (continued); Harms (1991) dual-task assessment of cognitive demands upon driving.

 

Tuesday, February 19

Visual inputs to steering behavior; Land & Lee (1994) 'theta' (tangent point) and 'd' parameters; Land & Horwood (1995; 1998) selective visual occlusion paradigm;  Donges (1978) and dual-level models: far stimuli provide anticipatory information in the service of stability (open loop); near (central or peripheral) stimuli enable closed-loop nullification of lane position errors.  Generalization of curve steering models to straight road driving.

 

Thursday, February 21

Modification of dual-level model of visual guidance for driving introduced by Salvucci & Gray (2004);  tangent point may not be so special after all; the curious results of Wallis et al. (2002) and the implications for open-loop vs. just-in-time visual cognition; time-to-line crossing vs. standard deviation of lane position as independent measures of far vs. near visual contributions to lane keeping while driving (J. Myers' USD thesis project).

 

Tuesday, February 26

Entropy metrics and Information Theory; Steering Entropy

 

Thursday, February 28

Spectral analysis of steering wheel time-series data; Introduction to nighttime driving

 

Tuesday, March 5 - Thursday, March 7
Spring break

 

Tuesday, March 12
Night myopia; Introduction to retroreflectivity

 

Thursday, March 14

Retroreflectivity demonstration in vision alley; install and demo ERGO2000 retroreflectivity analysis software.  Assignment: Morgan (2001) reaction paper due 3/21.

Tuesday, March 19
Clearview font and the irradiance problem; Fluorescent colored highway signs: fluorescence vs. fluorence; performance benefits of fluorescent colored signs.
Questions: How can we improve wet pavement retroreflectivity? What's the hidden problem with fluorescent red stop signs?

 

Thursday, March 21
Reduced luminance contrast of fluorescent red Stop signs; Mechanism behind increased relative luminosity of fluorescent signs at dusk/overcast conditions; A theory of fluorescent color appearance (based upon the MacAdam Limit).

 

Tuesday, March 26
Search vs. attention conspicuity of fluorescent colored materials;

 

Thursday, March 28

Optimizing the legibility distance of symbol highway signs using lowpass sf image processing; Pavement marking minimum visibility; Wet pavement marking retroreflectivity problems/engineering solutions. Assignment: Reaction paper on Redelmeier & Tibshirani (1997) due 4/4.

 

Tuesday, April 2
In-vehicle technology use and the driver distraction problem: cell phones and texting.

 

Thursday, April 4
Driver distraction and in-vehicle displays; large-format electronic billboards; Lane Change Task (LCT) for in-vehicle tech assessment.

 

Tuesday, April 9

Driver distraction

 

Thursday, April 11

Driver distraction

 

Tuesday, April 16

Socially-aware vehicles of the future; NHTSA rulemaking regarding DRLs; discomfort vs disability glare modeling and analysis; Read Cairney & Styles (2003) review of DRL literature

 

Thursday, April 18

Daytime running lights: visibility and conspicuity studies; Read Mace, et al. (2001) on glare countermeasures

 

Tuesday, April 23
Daytime running lights: crash analysis studies; headlight glare and glare countermeasures