Navigating a Car in a Foreign Country: Effects of Street Language Formats, Map Orientation Consistency, and Gender on Driver Performance, Workload and Multitasking Strategy
Driving safety of foreign drivers becomes one of major concerns with globalization of the world economy. Existing studies mainly used survey, focus group, and statistical analysis to study this problem. This study is one of first experimental studies which addressed the multitasking driving behavior (driving and navigation task) in a cross-culture context. Twenty-four native American-English speakers navigated a driving simulator in urban environments which involved three formats of language settings of the street signs (English, Chinese, or no street signs) and two types of map orientation consistency (Driving from South to North vs. North to South with a North-up map). Compared to English street sign condition, when participants drove in Chinese street sign condition, they made significantly more wrongs turns with reduced driving speed and perceived higher driver workload. No significant difference of number of collisions and deviation from central line across different language conditions was observed. Interestingly, the average glance duration of maps with Chinese street names was significantly less than maps with English street name. These results indicated that participants effectively managed the multiple tasks (driving and navigating) to protect the vehicle control performance by sacrificing navigation performance. In addition, gender difference was also found in navigation and driving performance in this cross-culture driving context. Further implications of the current study in transportation safety of globalization were also discussed, including providing necessary navigation assistances for foreign drivers and generalizing current results into other language systems.
Changxu Wu Jonghoon Lee Guozhen Zhao Bo Ou
State University of New York (SUNY)-Buffalo
国际会议
17th World Congress on Ergonomics(第十七届国际人类工效学大会)
北京
英文
1-10
2009-08-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）