Sixty subjects of both sexes and three levels of driving experience participated in an experiment of time to arrival in a real vehicle in which they were passengers in a straight stretch of 400 m long in a circuit. Subjects had to press a button when they estimated the car was passing between two targets placed on both sides of the lane during a period of visual occlusion, after a previous time where vision was allowed while approaching the targets at constant speed. In the simulation task, the same subjects had to estimate the time in which one mobile target shown in a computer display should appear after being occluded in its horizontal trajectory by a rectangle. While some results are consistent with the more general trends observed in other works, such as the general tendency to underestimation and sex differences, other results reveal remarkable deviations from the findings of other authors, such as the effect of driving experience, that was the reverse than expected, or the general assumption concerning the constant proportion between real time and estimated time. The comparison of both tasks revealed two different processes. (A)
Abstract