Objective: We investigated driver acceptance of alerts to pedestrian alerts issued by a night vision active safety system with pedestrian detection functionality using a method that leverages scarce and expensive field operational test data.

Background: Driver acceptance of automotive active safety systems is a key factor to promote system use and implies a need for a method to assess factors influencing driver acceptance.

Method: In a field operational test, ten drivers drove instrumented vehicles equipped with a preproduction night vision system with pedestrian detection software. In a follow-up experiment, the 10 drivers and 25 additional volunteers without experience with the system watched 57 clips with pedestrian encounters gathered during the field operational test. They rated the acceptance of an alert to each pedestrian encounter.

Results: Levels of rating concordance were significant between drivers who experienced the encounters and participants who did not. Two contextual variables, pedestrian location and motion, were found to influence ratings.

Conclusion: The subjective acceptance rating method provides consistent measures of acceptance in a controlled environment and makes it possible to leverage expensive field operational test data within the confines of the laboratory.

Application: The study identifies sources of contextual sensitivity to alerts issued by an active safety system and demonstrates the utility of using subjective driver acceptance criteria to inform active safety system design.

Objective: We investigated driver acceptance of alerts to left-turn encroachment incidents that do not produce a crash. If an event that produces a crash is the criterion for a "true" alert, all the alerts we studied are technically false alarms. Our aim was to inform the design of intersection-assist active safety systems. Background: The premise of this study is that it may be possible to overcome driver resistance to alerts that are false alarms by designing systems to issue alerts when and only when drivers would expect and accept them. Method: Participants were passengers in a driving simulator that presented left-turn encroachment incidents. Participant point of view, the direction of encroachment, and postencroachment time (PET) were manipulated to produce 36 near-crash incidents. After viewing each incident, the participant rated the relative acceptability of a hypothetical alert to it. Results: Repeated-measures ANOVA and logistic regression indicate that acceptability varies inversely with PET. At PET intervals less than 2.2 s, driver point of view and encroachment direction interact. At PET intervals more than 2.2 s, alerts to lateral encroachments are more acceptable than alerts to oncoming encroachments. Conclusion: Driver acceptance of alerts by active safety systems will be sensitive to context. Application: This study demonstrates the utility of eliciting subjective criteria to inform system design to match driver (user) expectations. Intersection-assist active safety systems will need to be designed to adapt to the interaction of driver point of view, the direction of encroachment, and PET.

The purpose of this paper is to document the utility of a novel empirical approach to quantifying the relative level with which drivers are likely to welcome an alert from an active safety system. We discuss an experiment that applies this approach and show how the level of acceptance varies across traffic situations and driver point of view. The results reveal that both point-of-view and encroachment direction should be considered when designing active safety systems that would alert drivers to impending encroachment incidents.

A critical element to successful command and control (C²) is developing and updating an accurate and lucid model of the interdependencies between functional units, e.g., multiple platoons of artillery and tanks. Two of the challenges to this understanding are (1) the adoption of a detailed description of interdependency and the associated understanding of interdependent functions (Brehmer, 2007) and (2) the application of that description to both own and opponent forces’ opportunities and vulnerabilities to provide for agility (Alberts, 2007). This paper documents a straightforward approach to modeling functional interdependency that addresses these challenges. The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM; Hollnagel, 2004) is shown to describe the C² functions of the DOODA loop (Brehmer, 2007) and the tactical and operational functions of military activity. FRAM models are applied to own and opponent forces in a computer-based dynamic war-game (DKE) to reveal and characterize both agile and unsuccessful C² practice.

We report on two studies of the mere exposure effect on the occurrence of flow. Findings reveal that: (a) pleasurable human-system experience increased linearly with repeated exposure to the technology of interest; (b) an habituation effect of flow was mediated by day; (c) performance was positively correlated to flow. Suggestions for future research directions for Hedonomics include mitigating the habituation of flow effect by incorporating an adaptive hedonomic design to reduce the effect of boredom that comes with familiar stimuli an approach that enables the user to create a balance between typicality and novelty in order to allow for changing cultural norms and personal change over time.

I discuss an experiment that tests the prediction of the social impact theory that immediacy matters and the claim that trust partially mediates its impact in command and control settings. Active-duty soldiers completed oral commands more quickly when collocated with an unfamiliar leader than when that leader was sheltered at a remote location. A questionnaire on trust in the leader revealed greater levels of trust in the collocated condition. The best-fit linear regression function reveals a significant positive association between self-reported levels of trust and response time. Additional regressions reveal that trust mediates the influence of immediacy on the speed with which soldiers executed direct orders. These findings support arguments against plans proposed by both the U.S. and Swedish armed forces that would extract platoon leaders from the field and replace them with remote command and control of the dismounted infantry.

The world is a dangerous place. Many recent events have served to render it unfortunately less safe and there are many arenas of conflict and even combat across the world. Such situations are the quintessential expression of stress. You stand in imminent danger and live with the knowledge that you may be attacked, injured or even killed at any moment. How do people perform under these conditions? How do they keep a heightened level of vigilance when nothing may happen in their immediate location for weeks or even months? What happens when the bullets actually start flying? How is it you distinguish friend from foe, and each from innocent bystanders when in immediate peril of your life? Can we design technology to help people make good decisions in these ultimately hazardous situations?To what degree does your membership in a team act to dissipate these particular effects? Can we generate sufficiently stressful field exercises to simulate these conditions and can we train and/or select those most able to withstand such adverse conditions? How will the next generation of servicemen deal with these inherent problems? These are the sorts of questions that Performance Under Stress addresses.This book is derived largely from a multiple-year, multiple university (MURI) project on stress and soldier performance on the modern, electronic battlefield. It involved leading researchers from multiple institutions who have each brought their own individual expertise to bear on these crucial, contemporary concerns. United by a common research framework, these respective groups attacked the issue from different methodological and conceptual approaches ranging from traditional laboratory modeling and experimentation to realistic simulations, from involved field exercises to personal experiences of actual combat conditions. The insights that they have generated have here been distilled and presented in order to benchmark the present state of understanding and to provide future directions for research in this arena.Although this work focuses on soldier stress and soldier performance, the principles that are derived extended well beyond this single realm of application. For example, one of the major forms of stress facing the modern soldier is information overload. However, this is a ubiquitous stress and is one that is faced by people in the business world, in research, in academe, in commercial enterprises and in most sectors of modern technology. This understanding, distilled from the performance of soldiers who stand in the greatest level of extremis, can certainly be applied to those who face similar, if less life-threatening, demands.