Ce travail de thèse a été centré sur l’analyse de l’impact d’un système d’alerte anticollision sur le traitement de l’information et le comportement du conducteur en conduite automobile simulée. Les objectifs de ce travail étaient 1) de déterminer l’impact d’un signal avertisseur associé à un système d’alerte anticollision sur le traitement de l’information à partir de potentiels évoqués ; 2) d’analyser l’efficacité d’un tel système en fonction de sa fiabilité ; 3) et en fonction de l’état attentionnel des conducteurs ; et 4) d’examiner l’adaptation comportementale au système au cours du temps. Grâce à une double approche comportementale et électrophysiologique, nous avons montré que le signal avertisseur agit au niveau de l’anticipation et de la préparation à la réponse ainsi qu’au niveau cognitif du traitement de l’information. Par ailleurs, nous avons confirmé que les systèmes anticollision ne nécessitent pas d’être complètement fiables pour être efficaces. Nous avons également observé que l’efficacité du signal avertisseur associé au système anticollision était moindre chez les sujets distraits, notamment lorsque la charge cognitive associée à la distraction était élevée. Ceci suggère que le signal avertisseur nécessite des ressources attentionnelles pour être traité et, donc, pour être efficace. Concernant l’adaptation comportementale au système, les principaux résultats ont montré, d’une part, que l’introduction immédiate du système a eu un effet positif sur le comportement de conduite et, d’autre part, que le processus d’adaptation au système à plus long terme peut être affecté si les conducteurs sont distraits par des tâches secondaires coûteuses en ressources attentionnelles. / This thesis was focused on the analysis of the impact of a collision warning system on information processing and driver behaviour in simulated driving. The objectives of this work were 1) to determine the impact of a warning signal associated with a collision warning system on the processing of information using evoked potentials, 2) to analyse the effectiveness of such a system according to its reliability, 3) and according to the drivers’ attentional state, 4) to examine the behavioural adaptation to the system over time. Using an electrophysiological and behavioural dual approach, we showed that the warning signal acts at the level of anticipation and response preparation and at the level of cognitive processing. Moreover, we confirmed that collision warning systems do not need to be completely reliable to be effective. We also observed that the effectiveness of the warning signal associated with the collision warning system was lower in distracted subjects, especially when the cognitive load associated with the distraction was high. This suggests that the warning signal requires attentionnal resources in order to be processed and, therefore, to be effective. Concerning behavioural adaptation to the system, the main results showed firstly that the immediate introduction of the system had a positive effect on the driving behaviour and secondly that the process of adaptation of the system at the longer term may be affected if drivers are distracted by high demanding secondary tasks.

Au quotidien, notre attention sélective nous permet de sélectionner les informations pertinentes au regard de notre tâche et d'ignorer celles qui ne le sont pas, afin de maintenir un comportement cohérent avec nos buts. Néanmoins, dans certaines situations, un stimulus complètement non-pertinent peut capturer notre attention contre notre volonté et, de ce fait, produire un phénomène de distraction. La distraction a initialement été considérée comme essentiellement dépendante de la saillance perceptive des distracteurs. Cependant, de récentes études ont mis en évidence que les stimuli associés à l'obtention d'une récompense (i.e., disposant d'une histoire de récompense) sont également susceptibles de produire des effets de distraction particulièrement robustes et persistants (indépendamment de leur pertinence pour la tâche en cours et de leur saillance perceptive). Parallèlement, tout un autre champ de recherche a été consacré à l’étude du contrôle attentionnel qui peut être mis en place afin de prévenir une distraction par des stimuli visuellement saillants. Cependant, à ce jour, très peu de travaux ont tenté de manipuler la qualité du contrôle attentionnel qui peut être instauré pour éviter la distraction par des stimulus associés à une récompense. L'objectif de notre travail était donc de déterminer si, et si oui, dans quelles conditions, ces distracteurs pouvaient être ignorés efficacement ou, au contraire, pouvaient résister au contrôle attentionnel. Dans sept études, nous avons associé des stimuli visuels initialement neutres à une récompense (monétaire ou sociale) afin d’étudier leur impact sur les performances lorsqu’ils apparaissaient comme distracteurs dans des tâches recherche visuelle. Nous avons manipulé la qualité du contrôle attentionnel en faisant varier les contraintes perceptives (i.e., charge perceptive : Études 1 et 2), cognitives (i.e., charge cognitive : Étude 3) ou sensorielles (i.e., dégradation sensorielle : Études 4-7) imposées par la tâche. Nous avons mis en évidence que l'interférence provoquée par un distracteur associé à une forte récompense monétaire, contrairement à celle provoquée par des distracteurs uniquement saillants, peut résister à l'augmentation de la charge perceptive (Étude 1). L'analyse des potentiels cérébraux évoqués par ces distracteurs (Etude 2) suggère que cet effet puisse résulter d’une capture attentionnelle (N2pc) accrue en charge perceptive faible et d’une suppression attentionnelle (Pd) moins efficace en charge perceptive forte pour ces distracteurs. Contrairement à nos attentes, aucun effet de la récompense n'a été observé dans l’étude manipulant la charge cognitive (Étude 3), nous conduisant à proposer que notre manipulation ait pu drainer les ressources cognitives nécessaires à l'apprentissage de l’association distracteur-récompense. Ensuite, nous avons montré que l'augmentation de la pression temporelle (Étude 4-5), réputée pour favoriser la sélection précoce d'une cible, peut au contraire, dans certaines conditions, entrainer une plus grande difficulté à ignorer les distracteurs. Pour autant, dans ces conditions, le simple fait que des distracteurs récompensés puissent apparaître semble impacter encore plus négativement la sélection d'une cible que la pression temporelle elle-même. Enfin, nos deux dernières études (Études 6-7) ont mobilisé un cadre expérimental plus écologique, impliquant la recherche de cibles dans des photographies de scènes routières prises du point de vue d’un conducteur d’automobile et l’apparition de distracteurs récompensés sur l’écran d’un smartphone présent dans l’habitacle. Nous avons mis en évidence que la dégradation sensorielle de la cible (via une augmentation de l'intensité du brouillard) entraine une distraction plus importante pour des distracteurs associés à une récompense sociale, en particulier pour les personnes présentant un niveau élevé de FoMO (Fear of Missing Out ; peur de manquer une expérience sociale). [...] / In our daily activities, selective attention allow us to select task-relevant information among irrelevant ones, in order to maintain consistent, goal-directed behavior. However, sometimes, a completely irrelevant stimulus can capture our attention against our will and, as a result, produce a distraction phenomenon. Distraction was initially considered to be essentially dependent on the perceptual salience of the distractors. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that stimuli associated with reward outcome (i.e., with a reward history) are also likely to produce particularly robust and persistent distraction effects (regardless of their relevance to the task at hand and their perceptual salience). Alongside, a large body of works has been devoted to the study of attentional control, which could prevent distraction by perceptually salient distractors. However, to date, very little work has attempted to manipulate the quality of the attentional control that could be implemented to avoid distraction by reward history. The objective of our work was therefore to determine whether, and if so, under what conditions, reward-distractors could be ignored or, on the contrary, could resist attentional control. Seven studies were conducted with neutral visual stimuli associated with (monetary or social) reward outcome, in order to investigate how they could affect task performance when they appeared as distractors in visual search tasks. Attentional control was manipulated by varying the perceptual (i.e., perceptual load: Studies 1 and 2), cognitive (i.e., cognitive load: Study 3) or sensory (i.e., sensory degradation: Studies 4-7) demands imposed by the task. We have shown that high-reward distractor interference resists to perceptual load increase, unlike that caused by only salient distractor (Study 1). Our event-related potentials study (Study 2) suggests that this effect may be due to an enhanced attentional capture (N2pc) under low perceptual load and by a less effective attentional suppression (Pd) under high perceptual load for high-reward distractors. Next, contrary to our expectations, no effect of reward history was observed when manipulating cognitive load (Study 3), leading us to propose that our manipulation could have drained the cognitive resources necessary to learn the distractor-reward association. Then, we have shown that the increase in time pressure (Studies 4-5), known to promote the early selection of relevant targets, could also enhanced the difficulty to ignore distractors under some circumstances. Nevertheless, in these conditions, the mere fact that rewarded distractors may appear seems to increase the difficulty to ignore the distractors, more than the time pressure itself. Finally, our last two studies (Studies 6-7) mobilized a more ecological visual search task, involving pictures of driving situations taken from a driver point-of-view, in which reward distractors were displayed on the screen of a smartphone in the vehicle cabin. The sensory degradation of the target (achieved by increasing the fog density outside the car) has led to greater distraction for distractors paired with a social reward, especially for people with a high level of FoMO (Fear of Missing Out; that is, the pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding social experiences from which one is absent). These results are discussed in the light of the literature on distraction by reward history and attentional control, in order to integrate the reward history into these models. Moreover, our observations are discussed under the scope of applied researches that focused on driver distraction, in which our work has a particular resonance.

Master of Science / Department of Psychology / Richard J. Harris / Memory processes have undergone extensive investigation using various experimental methods. While working memory studies have profoundly influenced the development of new cognitive theories, including the Dual-Processing Theory (Mayer & Moreno, 1998), limited research has investigated the effects of subtitled messages on multimedia comprehension. Previous eye movement research has investigated the ability of observers to attend to the multiple sensory inputs associated with multimedia viewing (D’Ydewalle, Van Rensbergen & Pollet, 1987; D’Ydewalle & De Bruycker, 2007); however, eye movement research only scratches the surface of cognitive abilities associated with multimedia learning. In order to satisfy the need for more subtitling research two studies were performed to investigate the effects of subtitled movies on the comprehension of movie content. Both investigations involved the presentation of 10-minute movie clips from A Few Good Men and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Participants completed three types of multiple-choice recognition questions for each movie, including: pictorial-only questions, verbal-only questions and combined-information questions. Experiment 1 was designed to investigate the difference between levels of comprehension, when verbal information was presented only in the participants’ native language (i.e. English soundtrack and/or subtitles). Results of Experiment 1 indicate that participants performed significantly better on verbal-only and combined-information questions when their native language was present in the subtitles as opposed to the soundtrack. These findings confirm previous findings that reading verbal information in subtitles is more efficient than listening to the soundtrack. Comparison of performance on the pictorial-only questions across presentation formats in Experiment 1 showed participants in the English soundtrack with no subtitles condition performed significantly better than all other conditions. Although Experiment 1 provides a basic understanding of how native language soundtracks and subtitles influence comprehension of movies, subtitled media are primarily used when viewing a movie with verbal information from a foreign language. Experiment 2 built on the results of Experiment 1 by incorporating an unfamiliar language (i.e. French). The question sets used in Experiment 1 were also used in Experiment 2; however, two French vocabulary tests were also used in Experiment 2 to measure incidental foreign language acquisition. Consistent with the results of Experiment 1, participants performed significantly better on verbal-only and combined-information questions when their native language was in the subtitles. This finding extended the conclusion that native language verbal information presented visually (i.e. subtitles) yields better performance on questions requiring verbal cues than native language verbal information presented orally (i.e. soundtrack) to foreign language material. Comparison of performance on the pictorial-only questions across presentation formats in Experiment 2 showed no significant differences. Comparison across the two experiments reflected a distraction effect associated with the presence of a foreign language. Performance on the French vocabulary tests was very poor across all conditions and yielded no significant differences, suggesting that the tasks may have been too difficult.

Bakgrund: Barn behöver ibland uppsöka sjukvård för att genomgå vårdprocedurer av olika slag. Barns reaktioner på oro och rädsla styrs av ålder, förståelse, fantasi och verklighetsuppfattning. Barn behöver därför förberedas inför obehagliga ingrepp som ska hända till exempel: smärtsamma undersökningar, venpunktion eller injektioner. Dessa undersökningar kan skapa oro och rädsla hos barn. Syfte: Syftet med studien var att beskriva olika icke farmakologiska avledande metoder och dess effekter vid procedursmärta hos barn. Samt att beskriva undersökningsgrupperna i de inkluderade artiklarna. Metod: En deskriptiv design användes för att besvara litteraturstudiens syfte och frågeställningar. Studien baserades på tretton vetenskapliga artiklar. De vetenskapliga artiklarna söktes i databaserna Cinahl och PubMed. Artiklarna var publicerade mellan åren 2006-2016. Huvudresultat: Studien påvisar att icke farmakologiska avledande metoder som till exempel: blåsa såpbubblor, titta i ett kalejdoskop, lyssna på musik eller använda ”Buzzy” har haft lindrande effekt på barns rädsla, oro och smärta. Effekterna har skattats med hjälp av olika skalor genom sjuksköterskors, forskare och föräldrars observationer. Barnen har själva fått skattat effekterna av de icke farmakologiska avledande metoderna. Slutsats: I resultatet i föreliggande studie har författarna kommit fram till att icke farmakologiska avledande metoder kan lindra barnens rädsla, oro eller smärta vid olika omvårdnadshandlingar. Författarna har även kommit fram till slutsatsen att de avledande metoderna som undersökts kan användas i det vardagliga arbetet inom barnsjukvården. / Background: Children sometimes need to seek medical help in order to undergo treatment procedures of various kinds. Children's reaction to anxiety and fear are governed by age, understanding, imagination and perception of reality. Children therefore need to be prepared for unpleasant procedures that they will undergo, such as: painful examinations, venipuncture or injections. These procedures can create anxiety and fear in children. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe the various non - pharmacological istraction methods and its effects on procedural pain in children. And to describe the study groups in the included articles. Method: A descriptive design was used to answer the literature studies experimental purpose and questioning. The study was based on thirteen scientific articles. The papers were searched in databases Cinahl and PubMed. The articles were published between the years 2006-2016. Result: The study demonstrates that non - pharmacological distraction methods for example: playing with soap bubbles, looking through a kaleidoscope, listen to music and use a “Buzzy” have had a soothing effect on children’s fear, anxiety and pain. The effects have been estimated using different scales by nurses, researchers and parents' observations. The children themselves have been estimating the effects of the non - pharmacological distraction methods. Conclusion: In the results of the present study, the authors concluded that non-pharmacological distraction methods can ease children's fear, anxiety or pain at different nursing actions. The authors have also come to the conclusion that the distraction methods investigated can be used in everyday work in pediatric care.

My study offers a strategy to examine the effects of outdoor advertising on traffic safety. Innovations in the out-of-home advertising industry suggest the potential for outdoor advertising to increase driver distraction and therefore vehicle accident rates. Moreover, city planners need to understand how sign-free zones perform relativecompared to other areas and whether there is a safety rather conservational or aesthetic motivation for such planned zones. In addressing these issues, the present study uses panel data collected from the Massachusetts Departments of Transportation and Revenue and the American Community Survey on cities and towns in Massachusetts from 2008 to 2012 to assess whether off-premise advertising displays have a significant impact on vehicle accident rates. Ultimately, this study finds no evidence that sign density, or the number of signs per road mile, consistently impacts accident rates. However, the presence of signs in general significantly and adversely affects traffic safety, increasing collision rates. While this detected effect may be causal, it may also be indicative of differences in city-specific policies and environmental circumstances across Massachusetts cities with and without off-premise advertising signs.

Vehicle safety and road safety are two important issues. They are related to each other and road accidents are mostly caused by driver distraction. Issues related to driver distraction like eating, drinking, talking to a passenger, using IVIS (In-Vehicle Information System) and thinking something unrelated to driving are some of the main reasons for road accidents. Driver distraction can be categorized into 3 different types: visual distraction, manual distraction and cognitive distraction. Visual distraction is when driver's eyes are off the road and manual distraction is when the driver takes one or both hands off the steering wheel and places the hand/s on something that is not related to the driving safety. Cognitive distraction whereas happens when a driver's mind is not on the road. It has been found that cognitive distraction is the most dangerous among the three because the thinking process can induce a driver to view and/or handle something unrelated to the safety information while driving a vehicle. This study proposes a physiological measurement to detect driver cognitive distraction. Features like lips, eyebrows, mouth movement, eye movement, gaze rotation, head rotation and blinking frequency are used for the purpose. Three different sets of experiments were conducted. The first experiment was conducted in a lab with faceLAB cameras and served as a pilot study to determine the correlation between mouth movement and eye movement during cognitive distraction. The second experiment was conducted in a real traffic environment using faceAPI cameras to detect movement on lips and eyebrows. The third experiment was also conducted in a real traffic environment. However, both faceLAB and faceAPI toolkits were combined to capture more features. A reliable and stable classification algorithm called Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) was used as the main algorithm for analysis. A few more others algorithms like Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), AdaBoost and Static Bayesian Network (SBN) were also used for comparison. Results showed that DBN is the best algorithm for driver cognitive distraction detection. Finally a comparison was also made to evaluate results from this study and those by other researchers. Experimental results showed that lips and eyebrows used in this study are strongly correlated and have a significant role in improving cognitive distraction detection.

Background speech is annoying and distracting when working on tasks that require focus, and according to previous research, background speech is a common cause of reduced work performance. According to the interference-by-process theory, distraction is a function of the similarity between the processes involved in the involuntary analysis of the background speech and the voluntary processes involved in the task. In view of this theory, a similarity in language—between the produced language and the language that is listened to—may increase the magnitude of distraction by background chatter in comparison with when the language which is produced is different from the language that is perceived. The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether work performance—as indexed by writing fluency (WF)—varies depending on the similarity between the language that is heard in the background and the language that is produced. The experiment had a within-participants design with two factors: language to-be-produced (Swedish vs. English) and language of the background speech (Swedish vs. English). The sample constituted of 43 university students, with Swedish as native language. The result showed a main effect of language to-be-produced: WF increased when the participants produced text in their native language compared to text production in their second language. No main effect of language of background speech was found, and no interaction between these two factors was revealed.

The growing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in college campuses has dramatically increased the potential for multitasking among students who have to juggle classes, school assignments, work, and recreational activities. These students believe that they have become more efficient by performing two or more tasks simultaneously. The use of technology, however, has changed the student’s ability to focus and attend to what they need to learn. Research has shown that multitasking divides students’ attention, which could have a negative impact on their cognition and learning. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of distractive multitasking on students’ attention and academic performance in a classroom setting. Several studies in cognitive psychology have focused on individuals’ divided attention between simultaneously occurring tasks. Such research has found that, because human attention and capacity to process information are selective and limited, a performance decrement often results when task performance requires divided attention. Distractive tasks are defined as tasks or activities for which cognitive resources are used to process information that is not related to the course material. Multitasking is defined as the engagement in individual tasks that are performed in succession through a process of context switching. Using a non-experimental, correlational research design, the researcher examined the effects of distractive multitasking, with computer devices, during classroom lectures, on students’ academic performance. This study used a monitoring system to capture data that reflected actual multitasking behaviors from students who used computers while attending real-time classroom lectures. The findings showed that there was no statistically significant relationship between the frequency of distractive multitasking (predictor variable) and academic performance (criterion variable), as measured by the midterm and final evaluation scores. The results did not support the hypothesis that distractive computer-based multitasking could have a negative impact on academic performance.

M.Tech. / Purpose: To determine what effects flexion distraction will have on males with chronic lumbar facet syndrome, in reference to intersegmental range of motion and pain. Method: Thirty male participants with chronic lumbar facet syndrome received flexion distraction technique. The trail consisted of seven visits over two to three weeks. Treatment was performed on the first to sixth visit, readings and questionnaires were completed on the first, fourth and seventh visits. Data collection was concluded before treatment on the mentioned visits. Subjective data consisted of the Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and the Short-Form McGill Pain Questionnaire-2 (SF-MPQ-2). Objective data included global lumbar range of motion measurements using the Baseline Digital Inclinometer, and segmental lumbar range of motion by means of the Radiographical Midplane Angle method. Results: Objectively, clinical significance of the intersegmental lumbar range of motion increased from the L1/L2 to the L4/L5 level (2.2% - 17.7%), but showed no statistical significance. In relation to the maximal motion possible at these levels, the increase in motion escalated from 0.8% at the L1/L2 segment to 9.2% at the L4/L5 segment. The global lumbar range of motion showed clinical significant increase in all of the ranges except for extension, however statistical significance was found in right lateral flexion only (p = 0.045). The greatest increase in motion was observed in left lateral flexion (15.72%) and a decrease in extension (3.72%) was illustrated. Subjectively, the group showed statistical significant improvement in both the SF-MPQ-2 (p = 0.000) and ODI (p = 0.000). Clinical meaningful change was noted throughout the subjective data, which resultantly showed a 66% and a 67% change in pain respectively. Conclusion: Flexion distraction has shown to have clinical significant effects on segmental and thus global range of motion, and great clinical meaningful change in pain levels and pain perception. Thus specific segmental mobilisation does affect the segmental motion.

The Stroop Color coding and word test (Stroop, 1935) is a well-known phenomenon investigating cognitive inhibition, cognitive speed, attention and cognitive flexibility. The Stroop effect refers when processing a stimulus while being exposed to another stimuli simultaneous interfering with the first (Scarpina & Tagini, 2017). This study focuses on a performance part of the Stroop color coding and word test and its relation to personality traits in the HEAXCO-PR using the Mini-IPIP6 (Ashton & Lee, 2007; Sibely, 2012). An experiment was conducted with the control group ( N = 30 ) solving a Stroop color coding and word test and the experiment group ( N = 30) being exposed to two stimuli (audio and visual) with purpose to induce stress. The result of an independent t-test indicated that you can manipulate the result of a Stroop test measuring two outcome variables (Time and Error). One-way MANCOVA was performed with the personality traits used as covariates. The analysis indicated that Extraversion had a significant small impact on Time (F (1,52) = 6.872, p = .011 η2 = .117) ) and Openness had an effect on Error (F (1,52) = 3.167, p = .008 η2 = .057). Openness showed a significant effect on error rate in the performance. Extraversion showed significant effect as a covariate on the completion time of the test. Time and Error showed a significant correlation. To establish the relationship between cognitive inhibition and personality more research is required. More research is also required for the result of this theoretical study to potentially become applicable.