Capturing Attention to Brake Lamps in a Single Fixation

Rear-end collisions and distraction are major concerns in automotive transportation. This study investigated the conspicuity of current rear automobile lighting (red brake and red tail lamps) compared to a proposed arrangement (red brake lamps with yellow tail lamps) in a task where participants only had time to perform one saccade and fixation (200ms) to identify the presence or absence of brake lamps across 60 static traffic scenes projected on a screen. The hypothesis that separating brake and tail lamps by color alone would result in greater conspicuity as evidenced by fewer errors and faster RT was supported. Conspicuity of vehicle brake lamps will be improved in the situations tested by implementing the proposed yellow tail-lamp coloring on vehicles