The Development of a Method to Assess the Effects of Traffic Situation and Time Pressure on Driver Information Preferences

Contemporary Driving Automation (DA) is quickly approaching a level where partial autonomy will be available, relying on transferring control back to the driver when the operational limits of DA is reached. To explore what type of information drivers might prefer in control transitions an online test was constructed. The participants are faced with a set of still pictures of traffic situations of varying complexity levels and with different time constraints as situations and time available is likely to vary in real world scenarios. The choices drivers made were then assessed with regards to the contextual and temporal information available to participants. The results indicate that information preferences are dependent both on the complexity of the situation presented as well as the temporal constraints. The results also show that the different temporal and contextual conditions had an effect on decision-making time, where participants orient themselves quicker in the low complexity situations or when the available time is restricted. Furthermore, the method seem to identify changes in behaviour caused by varying the traffic situation and external time pressure. If the results can be validated against a more realistic setting, this particular method may prove to be a cost effective, easily disseminated tool which has potential to gather valuable insights about what information drivers prioritize when confronted with different situations.