Dear Istvan: This is to ask for your help. I am searching for a doctoral student (or a post-doc) in the field of MMI of the car driver, or possibly in a somewhat broader context of driver behavior and safety, in my university-funded project on measurement of driver skills and abilities (also including screening of esp. attentional problems in brain-injured and elderly people which comes close to your experimental settings in the lab). Actually I have a 12-months grant of 66.000 FIM available for a foreign researcher. The grant comes from the exchange program by Center for International MObility (CIMO). It was orginally for a Chinese doctoral student graduated in ergonomics from the University of Technology at Loughborough last September, but unfortunately he decided to return to China due to family reasons. CIMO decided however to allow this grant to my unit for some other foreign researcher and, now, I have to find a good candidate. A grant of about 6000 FIM/month is not much, and in spite of many inquiries from those in the IAAP/Traffic network members I have no good candidate now. I do contact you for obvious reasons: you know this Department and this fund might be more competitive for some young Hungarian than for people from higher economy countries. (Is this still correct?) So I ask you to check whether you know good people with psychology, ergonomics, or even engineering background who could be interested in driver behavior and safety issues, and to deliver this information to interested people. There are several possibilities to start a doctoral thesis (e.g. the project on the use of peripheral vision, see the enclosed abstract). There are good chances to get further funding for good people in this field, and the Finnish Graduate School in Psychology also started just now, providing 4-yrs grants for "contract-free" basic research for doctoral students--my unit is one of those accepted for that program. The main focus in our research is in the hard field methods, both unobtrusive and obtrusive (with an instrumented car), although laboratory methods - experimental and partial simulations - are being developed gradually, too. Just now, Mitsubishi Motors Co has donated us a new car, with an advanced distance measurement (and warning) system installed in it, to be instrumented for our research purposes. Nokia (which is the second in the world with their mobile telephones and the first one with OEM audio equipment for the car manufacturers) will provide us the prototype of their new integrated control unit for the MMI and feasibility tests. In this new car, we plan to start some physiological measurements, too, both for research on fatigue/attention and stress or work load. At the other end, we are measuring and testing driver skills and abilities among brain injured and low vision people. (We try to raise long-term service in this field.) Our brand-new results expectedly show that traditional neurological tests do not predict divided-attention problems on the road and, therefore, new computer-controlled tests are urgently needed for screening. Best regards Heikki Encl. RESEARCH GRANT AVAILABLE A research grant of 12 months is provisionally available in the traffic reseach unit of the Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki for a doctoral or post-doc researcher in the field of MAN-MACHINE INTERFACE OF THE CAR DRIVER, and ATTENTION PROBLEMS IN CAR DRIVING, including both basic and applied research problems. For an example of projects in progress, see the enclosed abstract (the report is available on request). Please contact me for further information. Heikki Summala Encl. Summala, H., Nieminen, T. & and Punto, M. Effects of the in-car task's cognitive load and eccentricity on lane-keeping: drivers learn the use of peripheral vision. University of Helsinki, Department of Psychology, Traffic Research Unit, Reports 28:1994. Abstract Much research on driver attention, including evaluations of in-car equipment, at least implicitly assumes that attention is where the gaze is. Research on the dynamics of visual attention, however, suggests that drivers may both use peripheral vision and learn its use, depending on the (primary and secondary) task demands and eccentricity. To investigate effects of task load and position on lane keeping, 27 subjects, 11 novices and 16 experienced drivers, were asked to drive along a straight stretch of road using only peripheral vision for lane-keeping while doing another task foveally. The task varied in position, forcing different eccentricities for lane keeping, and in mental load at two difficulty levels in two different tasks. In the visual attention tasks, the position had a clearly different effect on lane-keeping performance among novices and the experienced in terms of the distance covered before crossing a lane boundary. Novices' performance deteriorated with the foveal task at near periphery at the speedometer level, deviating 23 deg from the normal line of sight, whereas the performance of experienced drivers only dropped when the foveal task was down in the middle console, at 38 deg eccentricity. The result supports the hypothesis, based on eye-movement registrations, that novices need foveal vision at first for lane-keeping but, with increasing practice, learn to manage with more peripheral vision. A prominent change appears to happen between the first 5,000 and 50,000 km of driving. In the arithmetic tasks however, no consistent experience-dependent task position effects occurred. Different results obtained for different tasks imply that when evaluating in-car facilities, the task characteristics and the respective resources needed should be carefully taken into account. Heikki Summala, PhD Heikki.Summala(a)helsinki.fi (email) Professor of Traffic Psychology Department of Psychology +358 0 191-3450 (tel) P.O. Box 11 (Ritarikatu 5) +358 0 191-3443 (fax) 00014 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI Finland