Developing attentional control in naturalistic dynamic road crossing situations

Nicholls, Victoria I.; Jean-Charles, Geraldine; Lao, Junpeng; Lissa, Peter de; Caldara, Roberto; Miellet, Sébastien

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-39737-7

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…For the road crossing task we used the same video stimulus and design as in Nicholls et al ( 2019 ). At the beginning of the task participants were informed that they would be presented with a series of videos of road crossing situations and that they would have to indicate by pressing the spacebar on a keyboard when they could cross the road and hold the button down for as long as they thought it was safe to cross.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As the video clips in Nicholls et al ( 2019 ) were filmed at a real road crossing in Fribourg the driving direction would be incorrect for participants in the UK. Therefore, the videos were mirrored to simulate a road crossing in the UK.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Eye movements were parsed into fixations, saccades and smooth pursuits using the same custom algorithm as in Nicholls et al ( 2019 ; Supplementary Figure 2 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Relative Contribution of Executive Functions and Aging on Attentional Control During Road Crossing

et al. 2022

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As we age, many physical, perceptual and cognitive abilities decline, which can critically impact our day-to-day lives. However, the decline of many abilities is concurrent; thus, it is challenging to disentangle the relative contributions of different abilities in the performance deterioration in realistic tasks, such as road crossing, with age. Research into road crossing has shown that aging and a decline in executive functioning (EFs) is associated with altered information sampling and less safe crossing decisions compared to younger adults. However, in these studies declines in age and EFs were confounded. Therefore, it is impossible to disentangle whether age-related declines in EFs impact on visual sampling and road-crossing performance, or whether visual exploration, and road-crossing performance, are impacted by aging independently of a decline in EFs. In this study, we recruited older adults with maintained EFs to isolate the impacts of aging independently of a decline EFs on road crossing abilities. We recorded eye movements of younger adults and older adults while they watched videos of road traffic and were asked to decide when they could cross the road. Overall, our results show that older adults with maintained EFs sample visual information and make similar road crossing decisions to younger adults. Our findings also reveal that both environmental constraints and EF abilities interact with aging to influence how the road-crossing task is performed. Our findings suggest that older pedestrians' safety, and independence in day-to-day life, can be improved through a limitation of scene complexity and a preservation of EF abilities.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Relative Contribution of Executive Functions and Aging on Attentional Control During Road Crossing

et al. 2022

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“…An SSVEP index of covert attention throughout the overt tracking of a moving target would allow for further clarification of how covert shifts of attention are influenced by target speed, and whether the effects pertain to the strength of covert shifts, the timing of such shifts, or both. Target-speed related modulation of covert peripheral attention is of particular concern in the domain of road-crossing safety, where increased vehicle speed may disproportionately affect individuals who tend to overtly track moving vehicles rather than covertly monitoring them through peripheral vision, as is the case with young children [44,45].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

In pursuit of visual attention: SSVEP frequency-tagging moving targets

et al. 2020

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Previous research has shown that visual attention does not always exactly follow gaze direction, leading to the concepts of overt and covert attention. However, it is not yet clear how such covert shifts of visual attention to peripheral regions impact the processing of the targets we directly foveate as they move in our visual field. The current study utilised the coregistration of eye-position and EEG recordings while participants tracked moving targets that were embedded with a 30 Hz frequency tag in a Steady State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) paradigm. When the task required attention to be divided between the moving target (overt attention) and a peripheral region where a second target might appear (covert attention), the SSVEPs elicited by the tracked target at the 30 Hz frequency band were significantly, but transiently, lower than when participants did not have to covertly monitor for a second target. Our findings suggest that neural responses of overt attention are only briefly reduced when attention is divided between covert and overt areas. This neural evidence is in line with theoretical accounts describing attention as a pool of finite resources, such as the perceptual load theory. Altogether, these results have practical implications for many real-world situations where covert shifts of attention may discretely reduce visual processing of objects even when they are directly being tracked with the eyes.

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“…The uncertainties of human behaviour upon emergent traffic situations have long been a blind spot 13 , 14 , posing high challenges in safety system design. Upon traffic conflicts, pedestrians used vision as the main source of information to make a decision and control their motion 15 , 16 , and exhibited a natural “perception-decision-execution” ability in avoiding danger to a certain level. Such capability largely relies on their own “detection” capability (e.g., via vision information) of upcoming hazards.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safety envelope of pedestrians upon motor vehicle conflicts identified via active avoidance behaviour

Nie

Gan

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Human reaction plays a key role in improved protection upon emergent traffic situations with motor vehicles. Understanding the underlying behaviour mechanisms can combine active sensing system on feature caption and passive devices on injury mitigation for automated vehicles. The study aims to identify the distance-based safety boundary (“safety envelope”) of vehicle–pedestrian conflicts via pedestrian active avoidance behaviour recorded in well-controlled, immersive virtual reality-based emergent traffic scenarios. Via physiological signal measurement and kinematics reconstruction of the complete sequence, we discovered the general perception-decision-action mechanisms under given external stimulus, and the resultant certain level of natural harm-avoidance action. Using vision as the main information source, 70% pedestrians managed to avoid the collision by adapting walking speeds and directions, consuming overall less “decision” time (0.17–0.24 s vs. 0.41 s) than the collision cases, after that, pedestrians need enough “execution” time (1.52–1.84 s) to take avoidance action. Safety envelopes were generated by combining the simultaneous interactions between the pedestrian and the vehicle. The present investigation on emergent reaction dynamics clears a way for realistic modelling of biomechanical behaviour, and preliminarily demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating in vivo pedestrian behaviour into engineering design which can facilitate improved, interactive on-board devices towards global optimal safety.

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Developing attentional control in naturalistic dynamic road crossing situations

Cited by 19 publications

References 64 publications

The Relative Contribution of Executive Functions and Aging on Attentional Control During Road Crossing

The Relative Contribution of Executive Functions and Aging on Attentional Control During Road Crossing

In pursuit of visual attention: SSVEP frequency-tagging moving targets

Safety envelope of pedestrians upon motor vehicle conflicts identified via active avoidance behaviour

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