Assessing the 'DOH!' factor: the role of performance feedback in vehicle navigation systems

摘要

This paper describes an on-road experiment investigating the effects of performance feedback on drivers' abilities to judge distances in a navigation context. Twelve participants (6 male and 6 female) aged between 20 and 40 were driven around an experimental route and asked to judge which turnings were at a specified distance (200m or 300m) by the experimenter and to give a confidence rating of their decision. Half the participants were given feedback as to which was the correct turning. There was a trend for females to perform better, although they were significantly less confident than males. Feedback did not significantly improve performance but an associated learning effect was found, in which feedback gave a steady reduction in errors, but with no feedback this improvement was absent. The results and their potential consequences for the design of in-vehicle navigation systems are discussed.