Mechanisms of Visual Information Acquisition in Driving

想象一下，你在街上开车，有人走到你前面的路上，没有看你有没有看到他们--你多快就能理解情况发生了变化？你需要知道什么才能及时停车，如何了解你需要及时了解的情况，以避免撞车？你的车需要知道什么关于你知道的，知道所有这些如何让道路对每个人来说都更安全？目前，人们正在推动汽车实现更多的自动驾驶功能，但要安全地做到这一点，意味着我们必须比我们更全面地理解驾驶者。例如，如果你的车载着你去上班，但遇到了它无法处理的情况，并要求你接手，你需要做什么才能理解发生了什么，更不用说避开刚刚走上马路的驼鹿了？从根本上说，这更多地是一个人类视觉感知的问题，而不是一个工程问题：司机如何理解动态的、真实的情况，比如他们面前的道路？在事情发生之前，司机没有时间去看世界上的一切，那么他们如何在需要的时候获得他们需要的信息，他们如何学习如何做到这一点，他们的能力是如何随着年龄的增长而变化的？我们可以观看一张真实世界的照片，并在一眨眼的时间内理解它，使用整个图像中的信息，不仅是我们正在看的地方，而且当一切都在移动的时候，我们在现实中做什么？我们如何在路上做到这一点，在路上，物体在我们周围移动，我们在世界上移动？对驾驶员行为的研究谈到了情境意识的概念，我们对环境和可能发生的事情的意识，但并不问我们如何获得发展这种意识所需的信息。这项建议建立在我在信息获取方面的工作基础上，在我的工作中，我假设我们需要了解的关于我们用外围视觉获得的世界的很多东西，也就是说，从我们现在正在观看的视野中的其他地方，以及我们只有在需要关于特定事物的更多细节时才会关注世界上的特定事物或位置。在这份建议中，我问：1)司机在开车时什么时候需要查看特定的东西或位置，他们的视野的其余部分什么时候给他们他们需要的东西？2)司机需要多少关于我们环境的信息，他们没有什么可以做的？3)司机如何学会平衡我们对信息的需求和他们获得这些信息的工具，随着我们的学习和年龄的增长，这一点是如何改变的？这些问题的答案对于设计下一代车辆至关重要，这些车辆考虑了司机可以感知什么和不能感知什么，而发展这种理解将有助于我们更好地理解我们如何感知世界，并帮助使道路对每个人来说都更安全。

Imagine you are driving down the street, and someone steps into the road ahead of you without looking to see if you have seen them - how quickly can you understand that the situation has changed? What do you need to know to stop in time, and how do you learn what you need to know about the situation in time to avoid a crash? What does your car need to know about what you know, and how can knowing all of this make the road safer for everyone? Right now, there is a push for more self-driving features in cars, but doing this safely means that we have to understand the person in the driver's seat more completely than we do. If, for example, your car is driving you to work, but encounters a situation it cannot handle and asks you to take over, what does it take for you to understand what is going on, much less to avoid the moose that just stepped into the road? Fundamentally, this is a question of human visual perception more than it is a question of engineering: how do drivers understand dynamic, real-world situations, like the road ahead of them? Drivers do not have time to look at everything in the world before events overtake them, so how do they get the information they need when they need it, how do they learn to do this, and how do their abilities change as they age? We can look at a photo of a real-world scene and understand it in the blink of an eye, using information from across the entire image, not just where we are looking, but what do we do in real situations when everything is moving? How do we do this on the road, where objects move around us and we move through the world? Research on driver behavior talks about the concept of Situation Awareness, our awareness of our environment and what might happen, but does not ask how we get the information we need to develop this awareness. This proposal builds on my work on Information Acquisition, where I hypothesize that much of what we need to know about the world we acquire with peripheral vision, that is, from the rest of our field of view away from where we are looking now, and that we look at specific things or locations in the world only when we need more detail about something specific. In this proposal, I ask: 1)When do drivers need to look at particular things or locations when driving, and when does the rest of their visual field give them what they need? 2)How much information about our environment do drivers need and what can they do without? 3)How do drivers learn to balance our need for information with the tools they have to acquire it, and how does this change as we learn and age? Answers to these questions are critical for designing next-generation vehicles that account for what drivers can and cannot perceive, and developing this understanding will help us better understand how we perceive the world, and help make the road safer for everyone.