By means of electronics the safety of car drivers may be increased. Electronic equipment may be used to gather information to transmit information to a central computer and to the car driver, to process information with computers inside or outside the vehicle and to present information to the car driver. Psychological aspects that may be distinguished in the application of electronic equipment in traffic are the direction of the attention (selective attention) and the intensity of the car driver's attention. With regard to selective attention electronics may be used to reduce the environment's complexity, to reduce the environment's instability, to modify the car driver's expectations, to prepare the car driver for situations that deviate from expectations and to enhance the car driver's alertness. Regarding the intensity of the attention, electronic equipment may support decisions and advise the individual car driver, may relieve the working memory and simplify the interpretation of changes in the environment and may take account of human errors that are made, especially under a high work load. The primary goal of the electronic equipment is, then, to reduce the car driver's mental load. Moreover, the presentation of the information to the car driver should be done such that the information processing does not include a high mental load. In this report, several fields of application of new technologies to traffic are discussed. (Author/publisher)
Abstract