Immediate Recall of Driver Warnings in Forward Collision Warning Scenarios

This paper describes driver recall performance for a forward collision warning (FCW) alert immediately after a critical lead vehicle braking event. A sample of 120 younger and older test participants, balanced by gender, participated in a study of alternative FCW alerts in the Ford Motor Company VIRTTEX driving simulator. A baseline group of participants received no FCW support. Each of the other participants experienced one and only one FCW alert type, visual, auditory, or both. Half of the participants who received an FCW alert had been given knowledge that such a system was in the test vehicle, and half of the participants had been told nothing. A digit-reading distraction task was presented repeatedly during the test drive. The last repetition of this task coincided with the lead vehicle braking event and FCW. Immediately after the event, test participants were asked if they had received a warning and, if so, what they recalled about it. Results were analyzed for those 93 warned test participants who interrupted the digit-reading task to respond to the FCW alert. Approximately 26% of these test participants did not remember receiving a warning at all. Only 58% of the test participants who recollected a warning could accurately recall its modality in all its details, although nearly 90% of those who received the combined audio and video warning recalled at least one of the modalities correctly. Those who received FCW information before the drive had significantly greater recollection than those who were not given any FCW a priori information. Age and gender differences were not statistically significant. The implications of these results are discussed.

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