Situation awareness and driving performance in a simulated navigation task

Abstract

The objective of this study was to identify task and vehicle factors that may affect driver situation awareness (SA) and its relationship to performance, particularly in strategic (navigation) tasks. An experiment was conducted to assess the effects of in-vehicle navigation aids and reliability on driver SA and performance in a simulated navigation task. A total of 20 participants drove a virtual car and navigated a large virtual suburb. They were required to follow traffic signs and navigation directions from either a human aid via a mobile phone or an automated aid presented on a laptop. The navigation aids operated under three different levels of information reliability (100%, 80% and 60%). A control condition was used in which each aid presented a telemarketing survey and participants navigated using a map. Results revealed perfect navigation information generally improved driver SA and performance compared to unreliable navigation information and the control condition (task-irrelevant information). In-vehicle automation appears to mediate the relationship of driver SA to performance in terms of operational and strategic (navigation) behaviours. The findings of this work support consideration of driver SA in the design of future vehicle automation for navigation tasks.

Keywords:

• In-vehicle automation
• Automation reliability
• Situation awareness
• Driving performance
• Navigation aiding

Acknowledgements

The first author worked as a research assistant in the Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at North Carolina State University during the completion of this research. The authors would like to thank Xuezhong Wang for his assistance in building all the driving navigation simulation models. We thank Sang-Hwan Kim, who assisted with the experimental data collection.