Clearly beyond the days of covered wagons, but in the mid
1960’s pioneering research was being conducted on the attentional
demands of automobile driving. This work did not require a private
racetrack or even approval from your local Institutional Review
Board (IRB). All it required was some mechanical ingenuity, a
few relay boxes, a slightly modified 1965 Dodge Polara, and I-495
outside of Boston. Although the Buck Rogers’ style lighting
bolt on the helmet shows that not all was taken seriously, serious
pioneering research was being conducted. Professor John W. Senders
(shown in the video and photos) controls the amount of time that
the visor of the helmet is down. While down, the sand-blasted
visor allows in light, but no details – not even the shadow
of large trucks coming at you from the wrong lane. The empirical
component of Senders’ research was conducted to confirm
the predictions of his Control Theory-based models.
Caption: This is an embedded YouTube video
and was posted to YouTube with the permission of Professor
John W. Senders.
For more modern treatments of occlusion in driving see these
papers all of which may be found at http://www.hms.uq.edu.au/vislab:
Wallis, G., Chatziastros, A., Tresilian, J. and Tomasevic, N.
(2007). The role of visual and non-visual feedback in a vehicle
steering task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance, 33, 1127-1144.
Kristen L. Macuga, Andrew C. Beall, Jonathan W. Kelly, Roy S.
Smith, Jack M. Loomis (2007) Changing lanes: inertial cues and
explicit path information facilitate steering performance when
visual feedback is removed Exp Brain Res 178:141-150
Wallis, G., Chatziastros, A. and Bülthoff, H.H. (2002).
An unexpected role for visual feedback in vehicle steering control.
Current Biology, 12, 295-299.
Hildreth, E., Beusmans, J., Boer, E., and Royden, C. (2000).
From vision to action: experiments and models of steering control
during driving. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 26, 1106-1132.
Godthelp, J. (1985). Precognitive control: open and closed loop
steering in a lane change manoeuvre. Ergonomics 28, 1419-1438.
