Abstract
We evaluated a way in which the horizontal information painted on the road for the exit to a locality is being implemented, where the name is written inverting the automatic processes of reading. For example, the road exit to “New York” is placed in two lines and is written from top to bottom and from left to right, in the first line “YORK”, and in the second “NEW” instead of the natural reading that would be in the first line “NEW” and in second “YORK”. A driving task was simulated to assess the effects of using the writing of the horizontal signs of exit to locality in two conditions: one that respected the principles of automatic reading processes (coherent) and another inverse that did not respect these principles (incoherent). Reaction time and errors in the natural reading condition were significantly lower than in the reverse condition, thus for the sake of safety, the design of incoherent horizontal informational messages painted on the road should not be used.
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Acknowledgments
Research funded by Ciaud Project UID/EAT/4008/2020 and LARSyS-FCT Plurianual fundings 2020–2023 (UIDB/50009/2020).
Special acknowledgements to former Master students, André Figueiredo, Catarina Brito and Joana Carvalho, also authors in this paper, that accepted the challenge of developing this experimental work for their evaluation in the Cognitive Ergonomics Curricular Unity.
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Noriega, P., Vilar, E., Figueiredo, A., Brito, C., Carvalho, J., Rebelo, F. (2021). Costs for Road Safety of Countering the Automatic Processes of Natural Reading in the Design of Horizontal Road Information. In: Rebelo, F. (eds) Advances in Ergonomics in Design. AHFE 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 261. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79760-7_69
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79760-7_69
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