Subliminal Visual Information to Enhance Driver Awareness and Induce Behavior Change

Steering a vehicle has become a challenging task and this is underpinned by the fact that more than ninety percent of vehicle accidents are caused by driver errors. Cautionary, not the classical driving errors lead to this number, but accidents caused by distracted drivers reaching or exceeding their cognitive limits. To address this problem, i. e., to mitigate driving problems caused by excessive information, we propose to induce a non-conscious behavioral change in drivers by employing subliminal techniques. Within a driving simulator study we have demonstrated the feasibility of the approach to support drivers with added information without dissipating available attention resources. In a Lane Change Task (LCT) similar to ISO 26022-2010 we exposed drivers to sequences of briefly flashed visual stimuli (subliminally flashed lane change requests) to change their steering behavior. The results of the study, while mainly not statistically significant, still give support to our hypothesis that there are positive di?erences between control group (no subliminal messages) and test group (exposed to subliminal cues). More research and experimentation is needed to improve on the perception of information priming, but we are confident that subliminally driven interfaces will find their way as additional information provider into the cars of the future.