Driving force gt

The driving scenarios were built and executed in a driving simulator designed and programmed specifically for our paradigm. A steering wheel (Logitech driving force GT) with feet pedals was used to control the car, which had an automatic transmission. The center of the steering wheel contained three buttons on the right side that were used to answer the quiz questions. On the back of the wheel two buttons (one on each side) could be used to activate the left or right turn signal. Participants wore headphones for the auditory stimuli. The simulation was viewed on a 23-inch LCD display at 120 Hz, at a distance of approximately 70 cm from the participant. The simulation environment can be seen in Figure 2. Visible are the hood of the car, the windscreen wipers, a speedometer, turn signal indicators, a rear-view mirror, and the current bonus score. The hood of the car is shown to better judge the road position while driving and to give a sense of size to the information presented in the outside world. Continuous data from the simulation was recorded at 50 Hz. We recorded the car position, pedal pressure, wheel angle, speed, direction indicators, and contact with other cars.

We used the same apparatus as in Zhao et al., (2019 (link), 2021 (link)). We used Vizard (WorldViz, Santa Barbara, CA, US) to generate all the virtual environments. The display was presented in a head-mounted display (HMD, Oculus Rift DK 2, OculusVR, Irvine, CA, US) at 60 Hz, which provided stereoscopic viewing with an 80° (vertical) × 80° (horizontal) field of view. Participants sat on a chair and used a force feedback steering wheel with a turning range of 450° left/right (Driving Force GT, Logitech, Newark, CA, US) fixed to a desk in front of the chair to control the heading direction. The steering wheel’s current turning angle determined the car’s current turning rate, with each 5° of turning angle mapping to 1°/s turning rate. The car’s heading was updated by integrating the turning rate of the car on each frame as follows: $${\phi }_{i+1}=\phi +\mathrm{\Delta }{t}_i{\dot{\phi }}_i,$$ where ${\phi }_i$ is the heading direction in the ith frame, ${\dot{\phi }}_i$ is the turning rate, and $\mathrm{\Delta }{t}_i$ is the duration of that frame, respectively. The car’s location was updated by translating it in its current heading direction at a fixed speed of 7 m/s.