In our highly mobile environment, driving accidents pose a major threat to our quality of life. In the U.S.A., roughly 43,000 people were killed and 3 million were injured in driving accidents in the year 2004 (NHTSA, 2006). Two keys to reducing the incidence of driving accidents are: (i) improving our knowledge of the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in driving through research, and (ii) improving driver training and awareness of the causes of driver error. With the support of the NSF Major Research Instrumentation program, the Perception and Action Lab at Arizona State University will acquire an Advanced Driving Simulator to be used for innovative driving safety research and education programs. The research programs in this project will investigate how drivers used visual information for collision avoidance for particular driving tasks (e.g., left-turns, merging), how multimodal (tactile and auditory) warning signals can be used to re-orient a driver's attention to potential hazards on the roadway, how drivers organize and prioritize information as a function of age and expertise, and how the complexity, structure, and bandwidth of secondary tasks (e.g., using a navigation display) influence driving performance. The educational programs in this project will involve presentations to the local community on driving safety, classroom demonstrations/laboratories in the "Human Factors in Transportation" course taught at ASU, outreach programs aimed at elderly and teenage driver instruction, and undergraduate and graduate student training.
