This semester we are running a series of school-wide
research seminars every second Wednesday, 12-1pm, starting from Week 2 - 8th
August.
Guest speakers and topics:
·
Kristen Pammer
Attention,
distraction and driving in the loop
·
Genevieve Dingle
Music
and emotions across the lifespan
·
Kara Fedemeier
Finding
meaning in time: what electrophysiology reveals about how the brain makes sense
of the world
· Mohsen
Zamani
Theoretical
modelling of social networks to capture social influence/ persuasion processes
· ECR
Committee
Introducing the Psychology ECR’s
·
Cognitive Group
Why
would people use Bayes instead of NHST? And How-to! With demonstrations and
workshop
The first talk is by our very own Head of School, Prof Kristen Pammer:
Speaker: Kristen Pammer
Where: Keats Room AVLG-17 and video conference to
Ourimbah Science offices
When: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Attention, distraction and driving in the loop
Safe driving is predicated on
attending to objects that are important in the environment, but also filtering
out what is unimportant. Failing to detect critical objects when driving are
estimated to constitute approximately 5% of all crashes, and around 9% of
crashes involving serious injury. Looked-but-failed-to-see crashes describe car
crashes in which drivers are apparently looking directly at an unexpected
object on the road yet report failing to see it, resulting in a collision. A
cognitive mechanism that explains looked-but-failed-to-see crashes is
inattentional blindness (IB). IB is a phenomenon that occurs when observers
fail to notice an unexpected, though clearly visible object in their visual
field when their attention is engaged elsewhere. We have designed a unique
driving-related IB task to explore attentional allocation to critical objects
when driving, such as hazards and motorcycles, in different cohorts of drivers.
In this, we have demonstrated differential allocation of attention, and this is
important for our understanding of attention and situation awareness in
driving. Moreover, the complexity and familiarity of the driving task
impacts situation awareness, such that our capacity for identifying changes in
the driving scene deteriorates when the task of driving requires less attention
– such as in familiar or unvarying driving environments. To address this, we
propose that some level of distraction can optimise attentional capture of
unexpected stimuli by disrupting the attentional set for driving, and forcing
the observer to distribute their attention more broadly. This contradicts the
common understanding of distraction in driving, where distraction refers to an
additional stimulus that draws attention away from the primary task of driving.
Yet we have demonstrated that that task-irrelevant distraction - regardless of
modality - has the potential to facilitate conscious processing of unexpected
stimuli. This implies an optimal level of distraction may be required for
optimal attentional engagement. This is important in the context of increasing
automation in driving, where drivers are increasingly ‘out of the loop’ and
disengaged from the driving situation. Evidence of attentional engagement is
crucial to our ability to allocate attention in a take-over scenario.
