Reflexivity

The forty-six “glance points” represented in this graph illustrate eye gaze tracking during driving. (Now!) Dr Anuj Pradhan has been crucial in co-developing the RAPT novice driver training in risk perception over the course of a six-year doctorate degree and four experiments. Risk Perception and Awareness Training combines simulation and field techniques for assessing new drivers’ scope and skill in anticipating potential risks while driving.
Did you know?

• Car accidents are the leading cause of death for teens in US
• Teenagers, during the first six months of driving, have an eightfold increase in the risk of dying in a car crash
• Teenagers, in general, are four times more likely than older drivers to die in a car crash
• In numbers: teenagers are involved in 4.7% of the six million crashes annually in the US but compose 13% of the fatalities

Previous research has identified three main causes of teenage accidents, including failure to adjust speed appropriately to conditions (20.8%), failure to maintain attention to the task (23%), and – the biggest – failure to conduct an appropriate search of the driving environment (42.7%).

After his presentation, Dr Pradhan’s Dissertation Committee gave him some grief about the distinction he wants to draw between “tactical scanning” and “strategic scanning.” (They also asked him, right at the beginning, to take off his suit jacket and relax. This may have been the signal that they planned to heat up the room…!) The first question, however, came from one of the faculty during the presentation, and it involved clarifying the dependent variable of eye movement. Dr. Pradhan’s first experiment established a correlation between the recognition of risk (seeing it) and the knowledge that risks may be present (use of eye gaze to scan in order to identify (i.e. see) them if they are present).
Two more experiments refined the technique for linking eye movement with perception and recognition of risk. Results from the three experiments indicate improvements in visual search behavior in all driving situations, from the benign – when no risks are present, to situations with a minimal possibility of risk, and on up to situations with obvious dangers.
In other words, the students and volunteer test subjects who participated in these experiments learned about the strategic need for constant maintenance of visual attention across the broad driving environment which might require the driver (i.e., me – or you!) to engage in specific tactical behaviors in order to reduce risk – or be able to implement evasive action should a risk materialize because one has seen it in time! My contribution came with the fourth experiment, I got to test out the version in development – my experience (as an “older driver,” grin) may or may not have aided in refining the program, but it certainly reinforced for me that there is a purpose to where, when, and why I look and watch in the ways that I do while driving. (I learned that I could still do better!)
The need for this kind of training tool in driver’s education programs everywhere is immediately and obviously apparent. I was also fascinated by the application of temporal and spatial algorithms to the eye movements captured by the Mobile Eye movement tracker. Time and space coordinates for every eye movement had to be combined and crossreferenced in a Fixation Identification Algorithm with prior and subsequent eye movements in order to define a glance. These glances are then superimposed on the objects in the driver’s visual range, and categorized as on-road or off-road. In this way, the Mobile Eye Tracker pinpoints whether the driver’s eye looked directly at the truck parked on the side of the road in front of a passenger crosswalk, when (from near or far), and for how long. Does the gaze return or simply pass on to other objects?
In other words, the direction of eye gaze can indicate the driver’s perception of risk – or lack of it. Once a driver is informed of their own eye movement behavior, then their awareness of risk is enhanced (or should be, I think the larger research program of the Human Performance Lab is lacking a necessary qualitative element). In fact, after training in the tactics of using visual scanning to perceive the possibility of risk, Dr. Pradhan shows that drivers improve risk awareness in four significant ways:

1. Trained drivers maintain a wider horizontal range of vision
2. Trained drivers shift half their glances offroad, more trained looking to right – where more risks presumedly originate (compared with the untrained who look left & right more-or-less evenly)
3. Trained drivers glance off-road for slightly longer times (presumedly considering the extent to which the conditions in sight compose/obscure a risk or not)
4. Trained drivers learn not only to transfer recognition of risk types between similar scenarios, but also transfer the skill of tactical scanning to different scenarios than those they were exposed to during training

Throughout the presentation, I kept thinking, “if only” – if only I had had this knowledge five years ago — the language of “visual scanning,” “risk perception,” and “risk awareness” — then Hunju’s driving practice might have gone more smoothly for both of us!
Anyway, Anuj’s defense rolled along. Dr Krishnamurty pressed him on the relevance or distinction between top-down and perspective views, which Dr. Pradhan handled with aplomb: “I got you, excellent answer.” No wonder Jeff calls Anuj, “my Yoda.” The (self-named) Curmudgeon wouldn’t let go of the tactical/strategic distinction but I wager this is merely ground for the next stage of hypothesis testing and theory building. The Committee Chair, Dr Fisher, supported Anuj throughout. They grilled him for a mere quarter of an hour after kicking out us observers (selected members of the fan club). And then they only made him wait for about that much longer (or less) before Dr Fisher came out and ushered him back in with a handshake and announcement:

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Forty years ago, my dad embarrassed me by stopping on a winding highway in the Colorado Rockies and waving down other drivers asking if they wanted to watch the moon launch. I was six years old. We were on the annual summer camping trip. Dad had had the foresight to load up our black-and-white portable tv with a powercord to the cigarette lighter, and he had kept an eye on the time. Not too many cars passed by, and none took up his offer. My brother and I understood that he was excited, but the significance of watching that grainy image of a rocket launching into space was beyond us at the time. Ever since, I rarely remember the event without tears – my own bit of vicarious spaceflight, an historic event witnessed by one of the largest global television audiences at that time. I do not recall watching the moon landing (although we probably did), it must have been under more ordinary circumstances and thus did not imprint as deep.


The photos from The Big Picture’s Remembering Apollo 11 entry capture the glory as well as the sheer hard labor. One of the experiments (photo 29) has functioned ever since, demonstrating that the moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of 2.5 inches/year. (How does this influence, I wonder, the tidal flow of rock that the folks at CERN need to track?) A friend pays tribute to Neil Armstrong’s expression after the moonwalk (#24), a man who kept his cool “in situations that would have most of us soiling our pants — this incredibly brave, stoic man — is photographed by Buzz Aldrin with an incredulous, half-smile, his eyes brimming with tears after having just friggin walked on the surface of the friggin Moon.”
Stephen Hawking writes,

“Sending humans to the moon…changed the future of the human race in ways that we don’t yet understand and may have determined whether we have any future at all.”

I’m partial to the views of Earth. If only they were enough to keep us mindful of the very narrow conditions that sustain our atmosphere. Humanity is like the population of a spacecraft, only not everything is mechanized according to our abilities for control. In #35, Michael Collins describes the three billion human inhabitants of earth, two explorers in the Eagle, and one moon captured by chance. Now, we have still one moon, and there are plenty of explorers – but adventures of this type seem more rare. Meanwhile the population on earth has more than doubled. We have food and fuel issues that require massive infrastructural adjustments. Unlike a NASA spaceship, there’s no dedicated team working collaboratively to secure the future of our hardy planet. Tough as she is, there are vulnerabilities that need to be addressed in order to continue supporting a viable human population. Hawking argues that we need a more aggressive space exploration program to inspire more young people to enter the sciences, and that we need to be thinking in terms of centuries: 200-500 years to find Goldilocks Zones in star systems only thirty light years away.
The Goldilocks Zone refers to the conditions necessary for a planet to have surface water. Gilese 581c was discovered just two years ago, only 20.5 light years away. The thing is, while technology probably can get us there eventually, we’ve somehow got to keep this planet going at least as long as that takes! We now have the group communication tools to make incredible collaborations possible. Watch this ten minute video from Clay Shirky, an expert on internet communication technologies: UsNow: Part 2 of 7.

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Americans smile a lot. It feels good! Occasionally someone gives a fake smile, one of those that is offered up because it is socially expected, but most of the smiles are accompanied with eye contact that acknowledges, somehow, what a pleasure it is to recognize mutual presence. No more carefully-controlled neutral (or somewhat suspicious) “European” expressions. I mentioned to mom that I’ve hardly heard any Spanish – the monotony of English only accents how accustomed I became to the patter of diverse tongues. Now conversations around me unfold with too much information – I understand all the words, even if I lack context or background. She says people aren’t shopping (we’ve been taking multiple daily walks in the mall or Walmart), and I wondered if there are measurable effects of the bad economy according to language group.
After dropping mom for her PET scan I drove off to find a glass of iced tea. The Tomato Cafe was still under construction, so I wound up in Stoneface. I wondered how to reconcile their gang warning sign with the Lavender Festival.

Dad called to explain that the first thirty pages of Deaf Sentence (by David Lodge) describes perfectly his life with hearing loss.
Between medical appointments, spectacular sightseeing. We began with local architecture, specifically contemporary modern, in a new neighborhood with a bit of everything, even the hint of gargoyle.
The Lavender Festival was in Los Ranchos, with its long river-to-road lineas or tripas lots. We hooked up with my old pal, Laurel, and met some of her friends. I enjoyed the predatory bird exhibit.
From there, Laurel, mom and I took off to drive the Jemez, which turned into a long wander. We stopped at the Zia Pueblo. (I snapped the picture before the sign forbidding photography.) The New Mexico state flag features

“an interpretation of an ancient symbol of the sun as found on a late 19th century water jar from Zia Pueblo. This red symbol is called a “Zia” and is centered on a field of yellow.

Four is the sacred number of the Zia and can be found repeated in the four points radiating from the circle. The number four is embodied in the four points of the of the compass, North, East, South and West; in the four seasons of the year Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter; in the 24 hours of each day by sunrise, noon, evening and night; by four seasons of life, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. The Zia also believed that with life came four sacred obligations: development of a strong body, a clear mind, a pure spirit and devotion to the welfare of people/family. All of these things are bound together within the circle of life.

The red and yellow colors are the colors of Isabel of Castilla brought to the continent by the Spanish Conquistadors.”

We then took the historic Jemez Mountain Trail National Scenic Byway winding up through gorgeous red stone and lush early summer greens – mom kept exclaiming at the abundance of foliage due to the higher than average rains this year. We stopped at the Walatowa Cultural Center, learning about the “4 climate zones, 5,000 years of human history and millions of years of geological ferment” (quoted from the museum timeline). This land is home to the Hemish, who built some 62 major villages, with 9-12 major pueblos, since 1275 (the approximate time they began to build permanent dwelling places in these areas where they already lived). I didn’t imagine my camera would do justice to the majestic views (although now I wish I had tried, sigh) of huge vistas, majestic stone, and the magical open vista of the Valles Caldera (see wikipedia for a few decent shots). We drifted on through Bandelier National Park, marveling at its mix of beauty and destruction; the Cerro Grande fire of 2000 still much in evidence.

There was to be no science tourism, unfortunately. Security did let us in with no fuss (three white women in a old minivan apparently not enough to warrant more than the most casual wave-through – perhaps we fit the profile of “one of those liberals from Los Alamos” which we saw on an adopt-a-highway sign on the way down from Bandelier). Eventually (after what felt like a few passages through Area 51) we found the Science Museum (which closed two minutes prior to our arrival) but managed to enjoy the museum shop. I’m failing to capture the quality of the day’s light banter covering subjects ranging from family histories, genetic forecasts, singing fish, incidents and moments that didn’t happen, what we don’t know about geology, and other assorted random topics but I will say it was an entirely happy day!

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