Methodological and practical concerns have been raised about the main index used to assess the quality of road lighting installations, which refers to simple detection tasks in foveal vision. This study assesses how adding a driving-related task affects the detection of objects in peripheral vision, under mesopic conditions. The experimental design consisted of a three-phase experiment. In the first phase, two groups (control and experimental) performed a simple peripheral detection task. Based on these results, an individual detection threshold was computed for each participant and eccentricity. A tracking task was performed in the second phase for both groups (steering a tracking target along a circuit, on a screen). In the third phase, the control group performed the same task as in Phase 2. The experimental group performed a double task, with a tracking (primary) task and a peripheral detection (secondary) task. The results show that the tracking task caused detection performance to decrease from 84.2% to 67.5%, p < .001. These findings indicate that the small target visibility model used in road lighting may be improved by taking into account the effects of task and eccentricity on target detection.
Abstract