How to Improve Vehicle Lateral Control: The Effect of Visual Feedback Luminance

In previous driving simulator studies, the effectiveness of various precision teaching feedback systems on lateral vehicle control has been demonstrated. The aim of this work is to test the impact of the visual feedback luminance on the system's effectiveness. Seventeen participants were recruited to take part in the simulator experiment. Each participant drove for 4 consecutive trials on the same path; the first was a baseline trial, without feedback delivery. The feedback system monitored vehicle position, presenting an auditory stimulus and a visual stimulus with luminance change. To evaluate the feedback effect, repeated measure ANOVAs were performed on several lateral control variables. Results showed that the presence of feedback improved participants' lateral control of the vehicle, with drivers improving the investigated variables while maintaining a correct position within the lane. Furthermore, the multimodal feedback system of the present work was compared with auditory-only feedback, showing significant speed up in the performance enhancement, thanks to redundancy gain.