Abstract
It has been shown that when participants are asked to conduct a lane change without visual feedback, they almost completely miss the return phase, leading to a systematical heading error. Here we investigated whether participants could conduct lane changes correctly in the presence of optic flow, particularly whether the return phase can be activated by optic flow. Two basic types of optic flow were used in two experiments: (i) a cloud of random dots distributed in all three dimensions, and (ii) a textured ground plane. In experiment 1 participants were asked to change lanes in the presence of either persistent or dynamic (re-drawn every 100ms) dots. In experiment 2, participants were asked to change lanes in the presence of a persistent dots or a textured ground plane. Steering behavior was assessed on the basis of several criteria, including the match between an individual's performance in the presence of full visual feedback versus performance under each test condition. The results revealed that in the presence of optic flow, the return phase was proportionally larger than in darkness, but still significantly less than that required to return the car to its original heading (one goal of a successful lane change). It appears, therefore, that optic flow can trigger the second, return phase of a lane change maneuver, although it remains insufficient to complete the maneuver. Best performance was produced in the presence of a ground plane which provides additional information (e.g. locomotor flow lines), suggesting that in a biphasic lane change manoeuver, participants were better able to utilize such information than the information perceived from a 3D cloud of dots, presumably instantaneous heading.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016