To examine emotional face processing in mothers of different attachment representations, event-related potentials were recorded from 16 mothers during presentation of infant emotion faces with positive, negative or neutral emotional expressions within a three-stimulus oddball paradigm, and frontal asymmetries were assessed. Insecure mothers, as compared to secure ones, showed a more pronounced negativity in the face-sensitive N170 component and a smaller N200 amplitude. Regarding the P300 component, secure mothers showed a stronger response to face stimuli than insecure mothers. No differences were found for frontal asymmetry scores. The results indicate that attachment differences may be related to neuropsychological functioning.

This article seeks to clarify how autonomous vehicles (AV) could affect urban planning and the built environment, to what extent these effects are compatible with municipalities' existing objectives, and what lessons can be drawn from that. The paper combines a systematic review of the literature, a quantitative online survey and qualitative interviews with representatives from urban transport planning authorities in Germany. Four concrete 'use cases' were applied to structure the survey.Results show that respondents are rather skeptical about the compatibility of AV with existing transport and urban planning objectives, above all to strengthen non-motorized transportation and to promote public transportation. Particularly, automating private motorized travel appears not to match municipal planning perspectives. On the contrary, transport planners think that shared autonomous vehicles as a complement to public transport systems are more appropriate to support urban development strategies. Their most prominent concern with respect to AV is the expectation that car travel will increase with AV, propagating problems like congestion and negative environmental effects. However, survey respondents expect that effects differ quite strongly depending on how AV will occur.As a lesson, the study suggests that different AV use cases should receive specific attention to explore their potentials and challenges. The study likewise suggests to, given the discrepancy between the objectives of urban transport planning and federal government's policy focus, consider consolidating the communal strategic positions on research and development priorities. The results indicate a demand for studies that demonstrate how AV can respond to more fundamental challenges and goals that city planner's face. Given the wide range of potential implications, the study suggests to broaden the debate from its present primary focus on the transport planning domain to city planning and development.

The advent of fully automated road vehicles is a topic currently getting attention in the field of transport as well as futures research: the technology is assumed to radically change the way we move in the future as well as to expand and differentiate existing mobility concepts. Still, the implications of automated driving are first and foremost discussed from a technological point of view and uncertainty about how this transition might take place remains. The embedding in the system of automobility respectively the transport system as a whole, currently lacks analytical as well as empirical examination. In our paper, we will discuss the topic in relation to three possible sociotechnical transition scenarios: (1) evolution, (2) revolution and (3) transformation. We will extrapolate different scenarios of automated driving based on current technical, economic, infrastructural, spatial, and transport developments and discuss its consequences for the transport system and mobility concepts.

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New, i.e., shared and digitized, mobility services have been entering urban mobility markets around the globe. Among these new offerings is ridepooling, a mobility solution that bundles requests from passengers with similar routes in real-time and matches them with a vehicle. Ridepooling is quite novel in Germany and knowledge about users, changes in travel behavior, and impacts on the urban traffic system is scarce. To address this gap, we conducted an online survey among users and non-users of MOIA, a German ridepooling provider. Over 12,000 respondents completed the survey. The article presents results on ridepooling users’ characteristics and usage patterns. We found that MOIA users cover all age groups and are multimodal travelers—which leads us to assume that ridepooling enriches mobility portfolios and also serves as an alternative to the private car. MOIA is mostly used occasionally and, in particular, during the evening or the night. A specific focus of the article lies on users with mobility impairments as well as how and by whom ridepooling is used on work-related trips. Both topics are particularly relevant in light of changing travel patterns and transforming urban transport systems towards more sustainability.