Reaction Time Differences in Real and Simulated Driving

The poster shows initial results at the question to what extent driving simulators can be used to serve as cheap and easy realizable environments for simulating on-the-road behavior. We have conducted two studies comparing the driver’s reaction time in real and simulated settings with the aim to provide a metric for the differences in reaction time. The events were triggered trace-driven (simulation) or manually by the experimentor (real driving study) and notifications were forwarded to the driver using the modalities vision, hearing, and touch. We have found that (i) both settings provide similar results for the order of average response using the three modalities and (ii) the simulator experiment performed better, most likely by reason of the simpler setup of the driving simulator compared to the real world setting.