A laboratory based study on the effect of peripheral flickering LED sources on reaction time of drivers for object recognition

Abstract

The effects of peripheral source on On-axis visual task performance by human observers under different lighting conditions are very much identified. The effect of Color Temperature of the main and peripheral light sources also influences the driver’s performance in a real road. There arises a necessity to investigate the effect of peripheral glaring LED sources on driver’s task performance. In this paper a laboratory-based experiment is explained, which was carried out, to understand the effect of varying frequencies of peripheral flickering LED sources with varying chromaticity of main LED source on the reaction times of static human observers for test object recognition and to find the correlation among observers’ reaction times, main source’s chromaticity and flickering frequency. CCT is a suitable lighting parameter to experiment with as it can be directly correlated with chromaticity, a fundamental mark for a light source. It is found from the experiment that reaction time decreases as the CCT of main source increases irrespective of the increment of flickering frequency. Besides, it is also found that the introduction of flicker and change of flickering frequency have profound effects on human observers’ reaction time and flickering of peripheral glare sources increases the reaction time for object recognition. Moreover, it is also seen from the additional behavioral studies done on the participants in the same experimental setup that, the behavioral study supports the findings from reaction time measurement study.