Method to Improve Rats’ Skill at Driving Cars [research study]

Driver education for rats—and how to improve it—is the subject of this new study: “Enriched Environment Exposure Accelerates Rodent Driving Skills,” L.E. Crawford, L.E. Knouse, M. Kent, D. Vavra, O. Harding, D. LeServe, N. Fox, X. Hu, P. Li, Clark Glory, and Kelly G. Lambert [pictured here], Behavioural Brain Research, epub 2019. The authors, at […]

The Man Who—With a Blinding, Flapping Visor—Drove on a Highway

“John’s Story – The Science of Error” is a new documentary film about John Senders, the Ig Nobel Prize winning, pioneering student of human attention and distraction. Back Lane Studios produced the film: The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Safety was awarded to John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety […]

Shouting and Cursing while Driving (a new study)

Researchers Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge and Mª Luisa Ballestar at INTRAS (University Research Institute on Traffic and Road Safety), University of Valencia, Spain, have performed a new study on shouting and cursing whilst driving. “The aim of this study was to describe the factors and perceptions related to aggressive behavior of verbally insulting […]

A Yawn Detector, Networked

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) as depicted above, was chosen as a reference for the ‘Networked Yawn Detector’ (a car-driver safety-monitor) developed by Zhengrong Yao and Haibo Li of the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics, Umeå University, Sweden. “We test our system publicly, 26 students from the Applied Physics and Electronic Engineering Department […]

Influence of personality and fatalistic belief on South African taxi driver behaviour

  Are you one of those who believes that, when it comes to South African taxi drivers, road accidents are pre-destined, and not as a result of individual’s driving behaviour? If so, your beliefs could be erroneous – according to the results of a newly published study undertaken by Dr. Bright Mahembe (University of the […]