Car following from the driver's perspective.

In this commentary, it is argued that the car following models discussed in Brackstone,M and McDonald,M (see IRTD E104802) ignore one or more of the following issues that characterize to observed driver behavior. These include: (i) car following is only one of many tasks that drivers perform simultaneously and received therefore only intermittent attention and control (task scheduling/.attention management), (ii) drivers are satisfied with a range of conditions that extend beyond the boundaries imposed by perceptual and control limitation (satisficing instead of optimal performance evaluation), and (iii) in each driving task drivers use a set of highly informative perceptual variables to guide decision making and control (perceptual rather than Newtonian input). To elucidate these issues, a general driver modeling framework is presented in which the car-following task is highlighted (Boer,ER & Hoedemaeker,M (1998). In Proceedings of the XVIIth European Annual Conference on Human Decision making and Manual Control December 14-16. France: Valenciennes; Boer,ER, Hildreth,EC & Goodrich,MA (1998). In Proceedings of the XVIIth European Annual Conference on Human Decision making and Manual Control December 14-16. France: Valenciennes). (Author/publisher).