ABSTRACT
Recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience are beginning to have an increasingly important impact on the design of everything from the food we eat to the cars we drive. The research in our laboratory in Oxford is based on trying to understand the rules used by the human brain to combine the various sensory cues that are available to it, and then seeing how those rules can be applied to help design “things” more effectively. In our chapter in this volume, we have tried to show some of the ways in which such cognitive neuroscience findings are increasingly coming to influence the design of multimodal (or multisensory) driver interfaces and warning signals. We are particularly excited by this research area just now because it seems to offer the very real opportunity to temper the rapidly emerging new technologies/interfaces that are coming online for car drivers with a better understanding of the constraints that researchers have identified with people’s ability to monitor and process multiple sources of sensory information. We hope that in our chapter we have been able to convey some of our enthusiasm for, and belief in, the idea of neuroscience-inspired interface design. This approach to interface design holds the promise of being able
Reflection ............................................................................................................... 187 10.1 Driving and the Senses: An Introduction ..................................................... 188 10.2 Dividing Attention between Eye and Ear ..................................................... 188
10.2.1 Talking on the Mobile Phone ........................................................... 189 10.2.2 Talking to a Passenger ...................................................................... 191 10.2.3 Listening to the Radio ...................................................................... 192
10.3 Interim Summary ......................................................................................... 192 10.4 Multisensory Information Displays .............................................................. 192 10.5 Warning Signals: (Re)Capturing Driver Attention ....................................... 193
10.5.1 Multisensory Warning Signals ......................................................... 194 10.6 Vigilance: Alerting the Sleepy Driver .......................................................... 195 10.7 Conclusions ................................................................................................... 196 References .............................................................................................................. 196
to promote safer driving by enabling interface designers to develop multisensory displays that will more effectively/efficiently stimulate the senses of the driver.
