This paper is a discussion of past and present work at the Applied Psychology Research Unit, Cambridge, on the objective measurement of driving performance in real-life situations. The first three measures adopted were: 1. the pattern of component movements; 2. the position of the car on the road, and 3. the consistency in reproducing patterns of accelerations imposed on the car by the manipulation of the controls. Each of these measures was eventually rejected because of failure to meet one of the criteria of intelligibility, sensitivity, or quantification. The present method is to give the driver a subsidiary task to perform when he can and to use the level of performance on this task as a measure of “spare capacity”, which reflects the difficulty of driving. A recent experiment is described in which the method was used to study fatigue and driving.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
I D Brown (1962) studied this question.