Natural Mapping of Vibration Alerts to Wheel Responses: Effects of Directional and Urgency-Based Vehicle Warnings

Vibration alerts have not been investigated thoroughly to create intuitive warnings for takeover requests (TORs), providing directional information to drivers during partial driving automation. Using vibration alerts for TORs, the placement of the physical alerts in the system, and the orientation information provided to the driver could influence how a fast, intuitive response is chosen. The present study investigated whether vibration alerts, directional and non-directional, influence response time when choosing a direction to move around a hazard during a low and high urgency driving scenario. Unlike prior studies, which required forced correct responses, this study allowed participants to freely choose between two equally safe responses. This paradigm enabled the testing of participants’ natural response tendencies. Participants chose to steer more often using a compatible rather than an incompatible mapping based on the vibration alert location. This study recommends vibration alerts be designed using compatible mapping for accurate responses.