Rapid growth of the elderly population in Japan has shown traffic accidents related to older drivers to be an urgent problem to be solved in the near future. Physical and/or physiological properties of older persons generally deteriorate due to aging; however nothing is directly known as to the relationship between the cause of accidents and deterioration of those properties. Car driving requires a human driver to behave as a controller who can manage not only to process information through human sensory organs, but to provide appropriate maneuvers to the car. Among the sensory organs, vision is the most important cue by which most of the necessary information can be obtained. Preview time, being equivalent to the forward sight distance at a certain vehicle velocity, is an important visual cue in car driving, and this is tightly related to the stability of the man-vehicle system. In this paper, the experimental results of a tracking task using some features of the JARI Driving Simulator are shown with variation of preview time and driver age groups.
Abstract