Like all man-made artefacts, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems have certain limitations beyond which they cannot function properly or work at all. The users in the driving domain have diverse backgrounds and it is likely that many of them start interacting with the technology without having gained detailed knowledge, such as by reading user manuals. This study explores whether drivers with only minimal knowledge of the Lane Departure Warning system can recognize the system's speed threshold and update themselves about this in a dynamic driving environment. Since drivers are not always single-mindedly focused on driving, a group of participants was also prompted to perform a secondary task while driving. Our investigation allowed us to estimate the effects of 1) drivers' minimal mental model of the system's working and 2) insufficient knowledge concerning the system capacities, upon their situation awareness and their capabilities of learning from experience. It was assumed that the demands of multitasking would impair the driver's ability to observe the system's state and delay the mental model improvement process, compared to a setting in which driving was the only task. Experiment results using a driving simulator have been presented.
['Tabinda Aziz', 'Yukio Horiguchi', 'Tetsuo Sawaragi']
An empirical investigation of the development of driver's mental model of a Lane Departure Warning system while driving