Detecting the Deceleration of a Lead Car during Active Control of Virtual Self Motion

Twenty-five percent of traffic accidents involve rear-end collisions. One important factor that may contribute to such collisions is a driver's ability to detect the deceleration of a lead car. Prior studies of deceleration judgments involved passive viewing rather than active control of self motion. The primary purpose of this study was to measure effects of headway and deceleration rate on the detection of deceleration during (simulated) active control. We investigated whether the pattern of such effects was similar to those we reported previously for passive viewing. Consistent with our previous study, the current results indicated that, during active control, mean response time to detect deceleration was longer when headway was relatively far or when deceleration rate was relatively slow. The implication is that collision-avoidance warning systems may have to utilize different criteria for providing warnings under different traffic conditions.