Older people may be advised to switch from manual to automatic gear shifting, because they may have difficulties with dividing their attention between gear shifting and other driving tasks such as perceiving other traffic participants. The question is whether older drivers show a better driving performance when using automatic gear shifting instead of manual gear shifting. Twenty young and twen...

With the rapid expansion in interactive environments, the need for more sophisticated cognitive models of aesthetic emotion transition is even more pressing for both academic and industrial applications. As part of our research to develop a model of aesthetic emotions and their patterns of transition, we have conducted two free report experiments concerning an interactive environment (a driving...

Driving simulators emerged as a promising technology for the analysis of driving conditions and road users’ behaviour in an attempt to tackle the problem of road accidents. The work presented herein demonstrates the design and development of a driving simulator that aims to contribute towards evaluating black spots in road networks by promoting rapid design of realistic models and facilitating ...

Collision avoidance system with automatic braking has been developed to prevent rear-end crashes. It is pointed out that driver's behaviors could be changed by introducing such collision avoidance systems. Thus, it is important to understand the driver's behavioral changes with such systems and to apply the results to its better design for effective use of the assistance system. On the other ha...

This paper adresses the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem, that is inferring a reward for which a demonstrated expert behavior is optimal. We introduce a new algorithm, SCIRL, whose principle is to use the so-called feature expectation of the expert as the parameterization of the score function of a multiclass classifier. This approach produces a reward function for which the expert ...

Many vehicles today are equipped with navigation systems, and all of these systems use speech or a combination of speech and graphics to provide drivers with directions to their destinations. This study investigates the effect of gender of voice when providing driving instructions in English to drivers that are non-native speakers of English. In a 2(native/non-native) by 2(gender of voice) betw...

This paper reports on the evaluation of the speech output component of a dialogue system that enables the control of different home appliances via speech. It was simulated that participants called the system from the car and listened to feedback messages from the system. Their task was to judge the quality of the system’s output while performing a driving task in the TNO driving simulator. The ...

In-process assessment of trainee learners in game-based simulators is a challenging activity. This typically involves human instructor time and cost, and does not scale to the one tutor per learner vision of computer-based learning. Moreover, evaluation from a human instructor is often subjective and comparisons between learners are not accurate. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an automate...

Classical washout algorithm for driving simulators doesn’t take into account the non-linearity of human sensory systems. Our previous work showed that the most realistic tilt/translation ratio for the simulation of braking during passive driving depends on the level of deceleration. However, the interpretation of previous results cannot be extended to acceleration. Therefore, a new experiment w...

Motion platforms can be used to provide vestibular cues in a driving simulator, and have been shown to reduce driving speed and acceleration. However, motion platforms are expensive devices, and alternatives for providing motion cues need to be investigated. In independent experiments, the following eight low-cost nonvestibular motion cueing systems were tested by comparing driver performance t...