Washington, June 9 (IANS) Thousands of people are killed and maimed in road accidents every year, all because of distracted drivers. These incidents can be reduced with the right application of motion information and appropriate eye movements, say studies.
Two studies conducted at Vanderbilt University found that these factors can be beneficial in teaching people how to track objects without getting distracted or confused.
‘The question is how to get people to see more, respond faster and be able to avoid errors that come from losing track of targets,’ explains study author Adriane Seiffert, assistant professor in psychology, Vanderbilt University.
In the first study, researchers used specialised displays to test specific hypotheses about how people use motion perception to track objects.
The team of researchers expected that people would use both the speed and the direction of motion for accurate tracking. However, they found that people primarily used direction.
Participants in the second study were required to keep track of a subset of several identical moving objects in three different experiments.
The first two experiments showed that participants commonly looked at the centre of the group of the moving targets, while making repetitive glances to specific targets, a strategy called centre-target switching.
The third experiment measured the tracking accuracy of two different strategies, centre-target switching and target-looking. The accuracy was defined by the percentage of trials in which all targets were correctly identified.
According to Seiffert, the results revealed that people are better at keeping track of multiple objects when they gaze at the centre of the group of targets. Looking at the centre improved tracking performance compared to using the target-looking strategy, said a Vanderbilt release.
‘This could have important repercussions for how people are trained to drive. A better understanding of how the pattern of eye movements can reduce errors in tracking could help develop strategies for reducing crash risks,’ said Seiffert.
These findings were published in the Journal of Vision.
