Research Project
9983092
The Driving Simulator Core (DSC) provides the faculty and students of the CVCN, the Department of Psychology, NDSU as a whole, visual and cognitive neuroscience researchers in the region, and COBRE investigators in other IDeA states, access to a state-of-the-art driving simulator facility. The DSC is based on a DriveSafety DS-600c research driving simulator. The DS-600c includes a realistic vehicle cabin consisting of driver and passenger seats, a center console, a fully instrumented dashboard, a rearview mirror display, and controls for steering, braking, and acceleration. The cabin is mounted on a three degrees-of-freedom motion platform in order to simulate the motions associated with driving (acceleration, deceleration, road roughness). The simulated driving environment is imaged onto five 65? high-definition LED/LCD screens that provide over 180o view, and is displayed on three mini-LCD screens mounted on the rear-view and side mirrors. DriveSafety's HyperDrive Authoring Suite is used to model complex driving scenarios and to precisely control the presentation of stimuli within the simulated environment giving researchers full control over the environment, objects, and events that might influence the driver's behavior. The actual simulation is computer controlled using DriveSafety's Vection software, which controls updating of the displays, and also enables real- time data collection on several performance measures. The state of all vehicle controls and instruments is sampled at a rate of 60 Hz during simulations, enabling detailed analysis of driving-related behaviors. Moreover, response buttons on the steering wheel and center console facilitate the collection of data relevant for psychological research, such as speeded responses to events in the simulated environment. Additionally, a FaceLAB eyetracker (a component of the Eye Tracking Core supported during Phases I and II) mounted on the dashboard is used to compute point-of-gaze, within and outside the cab, as participants drive the simulated vehicle. For ethanol intoxication paradigms, the DSC has an Intoxilyzer 5000 (CMI, Inc), a current evidentiary- level blood alcohol content (BAC) analyzer, for accurate BAC measurement. The DSC also has AN/PVS-7B series night vision goggles for the study their limitations on acuity, depth perception, and distance estimation.
