Author(s)

Yanqun Yang¹, Xinyi Zheng^2*, Said Easa³, Qian Zhang², Aixiu Hu¹, Yu Liang¹

¹School of Civil Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China.
²Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China.
³Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.

Change blindness is an important phenomenon where a driver may skip some information in the driving scene due to its rapidly changing and dynamic character. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of simultaneous emotions and driving tasks on change blindness. Twenty college students with driving licenses were taken as the study subjects. The experimental program involved two types of emotions combined with four driving tasks. Showing 10 minutes movie to arouse two types of emotions was one methodology and using E-prime software to show one-shot paradigm of change blindness was the other. The results show that emotion and driving tasks affect change blindness. The subjects took longer time to perceive the changes in the mood of negative emotion than they did in the mood of positive emotion. The level of change detection was found to decrease after the driving tasks were performed. Furthermore, the tasks with traffic signs showed more change blindness than those without traffic signs. The groups performing the turning-right tasks exhibited more change blindness than those performing the going-ahead tasks. The practical contributions of the present study are discussed in relation to the human-oriented design of traffic signs.

Driving Tasks, Emotions, Road Scenes, Experiments, Change Blindness

Yang, Y. , Zheng, X. , Easa, S. , Zhang, Q. , Hu, A. and Liang, Y. (2014) Effect of Simultaneous Emotions and Driving Tasks on Driver’s Change Blindness. Open Access Library Journal, 1, 1-8. doi: 10.4236/oalib.1100868.