Driven to distraction? The effect of simulated red light running camera flashes on attention and oculomotor control

The impact of red light running camera flashes on younger and older drivers’ attention and oculomotor control.

“…It is possible that older adults' familiarity with driving scenes and experience reacting to brake lamp events may have attenuated any differences in capture; however, this is difficult to conclude considering the consistency in our findings and other studies examining age differences in location-based cuing effects (Faust & Balota, 1997; Folk & Hoyer, 1992; Langley, Gayzur, Saville, Morlock, & Bagne, 2011; McCrae & Abrams, 2001). Accordingly, Experiment 2 more directly examined age and situational differences in RLRC flash capture through the use of an oculomotor variant of the Posner Traffic Paradigm (see Experiment 3 of Sall et al, 2014). …”

“…Experiment 1 was similar to the first experiment of Sall et al (2014), but included drivers who varied in age and a simulated RLRC flash that varied in relative and physical salience in order to determine age and situational differences in RLRC flash capture. Specifically, younger, middle-age, and older observers viewed both day and night driving scenes and manually responded when a brake event occurred.…”

“…In these blocks, the flash (low, medium, and high) occurred on 10% of trials, and they were always anti-predictive of the target location. In order to maximize power to find age and situational differences in capture, only the 150 ms SOA was used, as this SOA revealed the largest capture effects in previous work (Sall et al, 2014). Participants were asked to maintain fixation on the center car until the brake lights of one of the cars were lit.…”

“…This facilitation transitioned to inhibition around 550 ms, conforming to the typical pattern of response times observed when attention is captured by an irrelevant distractor (see Schreij, Theeuwes, & Olivers, 2010 for another use of cuing effects as a marker of attention). In addition to eliciting these cuing effects, Sall et al (2014) observed that RLRC flashes captured the eyes, resulting in eye movements to the flash rather than the brake lamp event, and delayed eye movements to the brake lamp event when the eyes were not captured.…”

“…As the current study is interested in 1) confirming the distracting effects of RLRC flashes on observer's attention and oculomotor control, 2) examining age and situational differences in the distracting effects of these flashes, and 3) further categorizing age differences in cuing effects through examining differences in this classic attention effect with a more complex and familiar scene, two experiments were conducted. Both experiments utilized a variant of the Posner Traffic Paradigm developed by Sall and colleagues (2014) and named after Michael Posner because it was modeled after his cuing paradigm (Posner & Cohen, 1984). In the Posner Traffic Paradigm, a simulated RLRC flash precedes a target brake event by a varying delay, and observers are asked to respond when the target brake event occurs.…”