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Discrimination and estimation of time-to-contact for approaching traffic using a desktop environment

Published: 28 July 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Each year, thousands of pedestrians are injured or killed in traffic accidents. Identifying pedestrians' perceptual capabilities for street crossing decisions is an important problem. This paper examines this issue by seeking to understand people's time-to-contact judgments for short-range to long-range times-to-contact in a desktop environment. Two experiments were used to test time-to-contact judgments around 4, 7, and 10 seconds. Both experiments showed subjects videos of a car moving down a road toward the viewer. The first experiment observed subjects' ability to discriminate between two different time-to-contact values. The second experiment measured subjects' absolute time-to-contact estimates. We found subjects to be accurate at both discriminating and estimating time-to-contact in a desktop environment. However, performance worsens at longer time ranges, those that pedestrians typically use in street-crossing decisions. Our discrimination thresholds are consistent with other time-to-contact work, and thus illustrate that desktop environments are plausible settings to use for time-to-contact studies.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Blind and Sighted Pedestrians’ Road-Crossing Judgments at a Single-Lane RoundaboutHuman Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society10.1177/001872081245988455:3(632-642)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2012
  • (2008)Driving assistance system based on the detection of head-on collisions2008 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium10.1109/IVS.2008.4621275(913-918)Online publication date: Jun-2008

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    APGV '06: Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization
    July 2006
    181 pages
    ISBN:1595934294
    DOI:10.1145/1140491
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 28 July 2006

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    Author Tags

    1. pedestrian traffic crossing
    2. psychophysics
    3. time-to-contact

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    • (2012)Blind and Sighted Pedestrians’ Road-Crossing Judgments at a Single-Lane RoundaboutHuman Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society10.1177/001872081245988455:3(632-642)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2012
    • (2008)Driving assistance system based on the detection of head-on collisions2008 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium10.1109/IVS.2008.4621275(913-918)Online publication date: Jun-2008

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