Lee Gugerty: Research on Attention and Situation Awareness

I have been studying how people allocate attention and maintain situation awareness during driving using two tools:

In pursuing this research with my students, we have measured driving attention & situation awareness using a variety of techniques:

    Scott McIntyre, a recent PhD graduate from my lab, used simulator and eye-tracking measures to investigate how changes in automobile lighting (e.g., changing tail lamps to yellow while keeping rear brake lamps red) can improve driving safety by capturing drivers' attention. See:

    • McIntyre, S., Gugerty, L. & Duchowski, A. (2012) Brake lamp detection in complex and dynamic environments: Recognizing limitations of visual attention and perception. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 45, 588-599. (PDF)
    • McIntyre, S. (2008). Capturing attention to brake lamps. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 40(2),691-696.
    • McIntyre, S. (2009). Capturing Attention to Brake Lamps in a Single Fixation. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. (PDF)

    In her dissertation, Kristin Moore investigated how eye tracking can be used to assess SA. See Moore & Gugerty (2010, below)

    Mick Rakauskas used an implicit measure of situation awareness, in which SA is inferred from driving responses to hazardous events, to investigate how conversation difficulty affects driving SA. See Rakauskas, Gugerty and Ward (2004, below).

    Melissa Falzetta used an event detection technique, in which drivers detect and report on-road events such as swerves, to study how ADHD affects driving SA.

    We have also used implicit measures and query techniques to compare how cell-phone and passenger conversations affect driving SA. See Gugerty, Rakauskas & Brooks (2004, below).

Publications on Attention and Situation Awareness:

    Moore, K. & Gugerty, L. (in press, 2010). Development of a novel measure of siutation awareness: The case for eye movement analysis. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.

    Gugerty, L. (in press). Situation awareness in driving. In Handbook for Driving Simulation in Engineering, Medicine and Psychology. Eds.: J. Lee, M. Rizzo, D. Fisher & J. Caird. CRC Press. (PDF)

    Gugerty, L. & Falzetta, M. (2005). Using an event-detection measure to assess drivers’ attention and situation awareness. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.

    Rakauskas, M., Gugerty, L. & Ward, N. (2004). Effects of cell phone conversation on driving performance with naturalistic conversations. Journal of Safety Research, 35, 453-464.  (PDF)

    Gugerty, L., Rakauskas, M. & Brooks, J. (2004). Effects of remote and in-person verbal interactions on verbalization rates and attention to dynamic spatial scenes. Accident Analysis and Prevention, 36(6), 1029-1043.

    Gugerty, L., Brooks, J. & Treadaway, C. (2004). Individual differences in situation awareness for transportation tasks. In S. Banbury & S. Tremblay (Eds.), A Cognitive Approach to Situation Awareness: Theory, Measures and Application. London: Ashgate Publishers.

    Gugerty, L. & Tirre, W. (2000). Individual differences in situation awareness. In D. Garland and M. Endsley (Eds.), Situation awareness analysis and measurement (pp. 249-276). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Gugerty, L. & Brooks, J. (2000). Effects of sleep deprivation on driving accidents and drivers’ attention allocation. In Proceedings of the Human Performance, Situation Awareness and Automation Conference (pp. 220-225). Savannah, GA, October, 2000.

    Chaparro, A., Groff, L., Tabor, K., Sifrit, K. & Gugerty, L. (1999). Maintaining situational awareness: The role of visual attention. In Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (pp. 1343-1347). Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors & Ergonomics Society.

    Gugerty, L. (1998). Evidence from a partial report task for forgetting in dynamic spatial memory. Human Factors, 40(3), 498-508.

    Gugerty, L. (1997). Situation awareness during driving: Explicit and implicit knowledge in dynamic spatial memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 3(1), 42-66.