Professor Charles Spence, Oxford University

"Driving by the seat of your pants! A multisensory approach to capturing driver attention"

Humans are inherently limited capacity creatures; that is, we are able to process only a restricted amount of sensory information at any given time. It should come as little surprise then that ‘driver inattention’ represents one of the leading causes of car accidents. What’s more, these attentional limitations are currently being exacerbated by the increasing availability of complex in-vehicle technologies, such as navigation systems, cellular phones, etc. The development of new sensor technologies means that your car will soon know that you are about to crash even before you do. However, potential legal issues preclude the implementation of automated control (e.g., braking) systems in commercial vehicles. The problem therefore becomes one of determining how best to alert drivers to potential road dangers while minimizing the incidence of false alarms (which drivers find annoying). I will review traditional approaches to warning signals design, and then describe a number of recent laboratory- and simulator-based studies detailing a novel brain-based approach to the design of auditory, tactile, olfactory, and multisensory warnings signals (e.g., Ho & Spence, 2005; Ho, Tan, & Spence, 2005, 2006). The aim of this research is to develop a new class of multisensory warning signals that can direct attention to the appropriate external location while simultaneously priming the appropriate behavioral response on the part of the driver. Such signals offer the potential for improving driver behavior in potentially dangerous situations and so reducing the incidence of road traffic accidents. Finally, I will discuss some of the potential limitations that need to be considered when one starts to think about utilizing the body surface to present tactile information displays (e.g., Gallace, Tan, & Spence, 2006 a, b).

Biography

Professor Charles Spence is the head of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory based at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University (http://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/xmodal/default.htm). He is interested in how people perceive the world around them. In particular, how our brains manage to process the information from each of our different senses (such as smell, taste, sight, hearing, and touch) to form the extraordinarily rich multisensory experiences that fill our daily lives. His research focuses on how a better understanding of the human mind will lead to the better design of multisensory foods, products, interfaces, and environments in the future. His research calls for a radical new way of examining and understanding the senses that has major implications for the way in which we design everything from household products to mobile phones, and from the food we eat to the places in which we work and live. Charles is currently a consultant for a number of multinational companies advising on various aspects of multisensory design. He has also conducted research on human-computer interaction issues on the Crew Work Station on the European Space Shuttle, and currently works on problems associated with the design of foods that maximally stimulate the senses, and with the effect of the indoor environment on mood, well-being, and performance.

Charles has published more than 200 articles in top-flight scientific journals over the last decade. Charles has been awarded the 10^th Experimental Psychology Society Prize, the British Psychology Society: Cognitive Section Award, the Paul Bertelson Award, recognizing him as the young European Cognitive Psychologist of the Year, and, most recently, the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.