Distraction Factors Research Articles

Tracing the physiological response and behavioral performance of drivers at different levels of mental workload using driving simulators

Introduction: The use of mobile phones while driving is known to be a distraction factor and a cause of accidents. The way in which different kinds of conversations affect the behavioral performance of the driver as well as the persistence of the effects are not yet fully understood. Method: In this study, in addition to comparing brain function and behavioral function in dual task conditions in three conversations types, the persistent effects of these types of conversations have also been traced. Results: The results show that the content of the mobile phone conversation while driving is the cause of the persistent changes in behavioral and brain functions. Increased time headway and lane departure was observed during and up to 5 min after the emotional conversation was finished. EEG bands also varied in different types of conversations. Cognitive conversations caused an increase in the activity of the alpha and beta bands while emotional conversations enhanced the rate of gamma and beta bands. A meaningful correlation was found between changes in the theta and alpha bands and changes in behavioral performance both during the dual task condition and after the conversation was finished, was also observed. Conclusions: The content of the conversation is one of the most important factors that increase the risk of road accidents. This can also deteriorate the behavioral performance of the driver and can have persistent effects on behavioral performance and the brain. Practical applications: The findings of this study provide a basis to measure and tracing drivers’ cognitive distractions induced by different levels of mental workload through physiological and behavioral performances.

Intractable Vomiting in a Female Child with Gastritis Not Responding to Treatment: Atypical Pseudotumor Cerebri

Intractable vomiting is a challenging complaint in pediatrics that is caused by many gastrointestinal and extragastrointestinal etiologies. Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH) is one of the serious extragastrointestinal causes that could be overlooked due to non-orientation, atypical presentation, or misleading associated pathology. We present here an eleven-year-old female child with intractable vomiting due to IIH. The presence of concomitant <i>Helicobacter pylori (H pylori)</i> gastritis, which was not the cause of the vomiting, played a distraction factor away from the real cause. Moreover, the initial absence of the characteristic papilledema led to a delay in the IIH diagnosis. Treatment failure of <i>H. pylori</i> gastritis, especially when associated with headache, visual symptoms, and negativity of all other investigations, should direct attention to IIH even with the early absence of its characteristic papilledema.

Factors Associated with Student Performance in Finance Electives: An Empirical Study at a US Private College

The paper studies factors affecting college student performance in upper-level finance electives. Of the motivation factors studied (intended grade, intention to take the CFA exam, or attend graduate school) only the first is significantly associated with student performance. None of the distraction factors (job hours, job type, and credit load) has any negative effect on student performance. Of the self-perceived ability factors (Writing, Math, Reading, and Listening) only Math has some association with student performance. The grade in Financial Management I, and GPA have significant associations with student performance. Finally, neither gender nor age has any significant association with performance.

Virtual vitreoretinal surgery: effect of distracting factors on surgical performance in medical students.

We aimed to investigate the effect of four distracting factors on surgical performance in virtual vitreoretinal surgery. Nineteen novice surgeons completed a validated training programme on the Eyesi surgical simulator (VRmagic GmbH, Manheim, Germany; software version 2.9.2) until a calculated target score was reached. The training programme consisted of four modules: navigation level 2 (Nav2), bimanual training level 3 (BimT3), posterior hyaloid level 3 (PostH3) and internal limiting membrane peeling level 3 (ILMP3). When properly trained, the participants completed the training programme once without distraction to generate reference scores and times. Next, they conducted the training programme under the influence of each of the following: auditory distraction, 12hr of fasting, interrupted sleep and 24hr of sleep deprivation. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare the distraction-induced results to the participants' reference scores and times. As compared to reference score (328), a lower performance was found for all four distractions: auditory distraction (289, p=0.0012), fasting (302, p=0.02), sleep interruption (304, p=0.02) and sleep deprivation (300, p=0.0006). In particular, PostH3 performance was influenced by all four interventions. (86 versus 50, p=0,0012, 65, p=0.05, 72, p=0.05, 54, p=0.0007 respectively). Virtual vitreoretinal surgery is an important tool for practicing complex surgical skills without compromising patient safety. In this study, deleterious effects on surgical performance were induced by four independent distracting factors. This knowledge is useful to optimize surgeons' work conditions and ensuring the best possible treatment of patients.

Distraction factors on doctors and nurses in open-plan examination room

In Indonesia, there exist open-plan examination rooms in government-owned general hospitals serving thousands of patients each day. In this study, we developed a questionnaire with 70 questions to assess the effect of background noise level to 45 doctors-nurses working at pediatric, obstetrics and gynecology, and audiology clinics, respectively at Dr. Soetomo General Academical Hospital. The subjects have been working for more than five years. The background noise includes conversations, baby cries, announcements whose level is about 60 dBA daily. We used a simple statistical technique to determine the most to the least distracting sounds perceptually. The results are, then, crossed the spectrum of the background noises to find out the characteristic of the most intrusive noise. The results showed that the Pediatric clinic has the highest level and dominantly with high pitch baby cries in the waiting lounge. The distraction to either the medical doctor or the nurse may have lost of focus during an examination, determining a diagnosis based on the symptoms, attentively listening to the patient. Furthermore, the intrusive noise characteristic that distracted the staffs were perceptually different. In the on-going research, we investigate a suitable masker to reduce the intrusiveness of the background noises.

A Congestion Aware Route Suggestion Protocol for Traffic Management in Internet of Vehicles

Nowadays, both the modern and developing countries are planning to deploy Internet of Vehicles for smart transportation systems to face the traffic congestion problems. Shifting from current road conditions to smart ones is a real challenge where all the vehicles and road infrastructure are not equipped with wireless network interfaces. The urban environment is more congested than highway scenarios and has more issues of delay and travel time. Various types of route suggestion protocols have been proposed where most of them consider smart vehicles which are equipped with smart and intelligent communication devices. The most of existing schemes have not considered non-equipped vehicles which have a major cause of traffic congestion. This paper presents a route suggestion protocol to suggest an optimal congestion aware route in the network. Equipped and non-equipped vehicles are taking into account for congestion index formulation along with driving distraction factors. Simulation results indicated the greater performance of proposed protocol and reduce the travel time effectively when works with IoV as compared to traditional route suggestion protocols.

Factors Associated with Student Performance in Advanced Accounting: An Empirical Study at a US Residential Public University

This study examines some determinants of student performance in Advanced Accounting. Of the motivation factors studied (intended grade, intention to take the CPA exam, or attend graduate school) only the first has some association with student performance. Of the three distraction factors (job hours, job type, and course load) only the last has negative effect on student performance. Of the four selfperceived ability factors (Writing, Math, Reading, and Listening) only the last has some association with student performance. Finally, the grade in the pre-requisite Intermediate Accounting II course and overall GPA have significant associations with student performance.

How does interactivity of online media hamper ad effectiveness

The development of the Internet has increasingly led to advertisements presented on rich and interactive websites offering users a high level of control over the contents they are exposed to—sometimes to the extent of allowing them to skip “unwanted” ads preceding the desired content. While previous studies have shown that such interactivity and control can positively impact users’ subjective experience and attitude toward the advertisements, the present study examined their impact on users’ attention to the ad (using eye-tracking) and actual ad effectiveness (ad memory). It relied on an experimental design allowing for comparing the effectiveness of similar ads that were presented by realistic interfaces simulating common types of online media (in addition to “traditional television” as a form of passive baseline comparison condition). The interfaces consisted of a news website (including many stimuli surrounding the ads and an “ad countdown timer,” that might detract users’ attention from the ads) and YouTube (also including the “skip ad” option). Ad memory correlated positively (negatively) with gaze direction to the ad area (outside the ad area) and was particularly low when users had the opportunity to stop the ad after a few seconds. These results emphasize the scale of ad effectiveness decrease that may occur when the media interfaces offer users easy ways of avoiding video ads by gazing toward surrounding stimuli and by skipping the ads. The implications of these findings for advertisers are addressed, and it is suggested that future studies on the topic should include other measures of ad effectiveness and other distracting factors that might further detract users from online ad video content in real-life contexts.

With a smartphone in one's pocket: A descriptive cross-sectional study on smartphone use, distraction and restriction policies in nursing students

BackgroundThe use of personal smartphones is a reality in healthcare settings. Current research is allowing us to understand in what ways they help with communication and decision making at the point of care and their impact on patient safety. ObjectivesThe objectives of this study were to characterize the use of smartphones by nursing students, and assess their opinions about the use of such phones as a distracting factor during clinical practicum and smartphone restriction policies. DesignDescriptive cross-sectional study. Participants234 students from one School of Nursing in Spain completed the survey in 2017. MethodsA questionnaire was created based on various validated instruments for assessing students' use of smartphones, distraction associated with this use and the development of policies on their use during clinical practice. ResultsWhile 23.3% of participants admitting to using their smartphone for personal reasons at least once during their practicum, they perceived that their own level of distraction was low (6.9%). Notably, the level of distraction associated with others' smartphone use was perceived to be higher than that associated with their own use. Students' opinions about policies were significantly related to the frequency of witnessing other students and nurses being distracted (r = 0.139, p < 0.05), but not to their own distraction experiences (r = 0.114, p = 0.084). ConclusionsSmartphones are not widely used for professional purposes among nursing students, while personal use is commonplace. Nurse educators, students and nurse mentors need to work together to introduce strategies to facilitate care delivery through the use of mobile devices but at the same time must be aware of the risks associated with distractions, including to patient safety.

“Look at me!” Parental use of mobile phones at the playground

Research suggests that parent–child communication is rapidly changing as a result of the massive adoption of mobile devices and their penetration into interpersonal interaction within the family. Accordingly, this study aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of the impact of mobile device use on the quality of parent–child interaction in early childhood, based on ethnographic observations of 60 families at two playgrounds in the United States. The research findings suggest that parental behavior can be classified along a continuum of high engagement, divided engagement, and disengagement, often dependent upon whether and how parents use their mobile phone. Though mobile phones were not the only distracting factor during playground visits, their use was more highly correlated with parents’ disengagement from their children as compared to other distractors. Parents’ mobile phone use also corresponded to two main consequences for their children: safety concerns and emotional concerns, both resulting in missed opportunities for social learning. The results of this study call for closer attention to parental uses of mobile phones in public spaces.

Experiencing polyphonic music may enhance memories retention

Background and Aim: Early experience, prov­ide opportunity for later associative experiential learning by affecting multisensory systems. This phenomenon may because of the influences which sensory stimuli as sounds would have on non-auditory neural centers rather than just dep-loying hearing system, so the question is wheth­er music as a kind of complex sound source, could help in general cognitive functions such as memory circuits or, conversely, it acts as a distracting factor. This study was investigated the effect of auditory experience with special kind of music, called polyphonic music, on auditory, visual and logical memories function. Methods: Forty volunteers with normal hear­ing, aged 18 to 40 years, were participated in this experimental study. They were performed with Ray auditory verbal learning test, Kim Karad visual memory test, and Wechsler logical memory subtest in two states: no-music con­dition and music condition with a polyphonic piece as background music. Memory functions in these two conditions, and the effect of gender on performances, were compared between con­ditions. Results: Polyphonic music significantly inc­reased auditory, visual and logical memory performance compared with the no-music con­ditions (p &lt; 0.05). No significant difference bet­ween genders was found in memory tasks in both music and no-music conditions (p &gt; 0.05). Conclusion: It seems that presence of poly­phonic music while people had enough auditory experience about it, impress memory perfor­mance. It is possibly owning to multisensory functions of brain and the effect of auditory experiences on cognitive system.

Exploration of Factors Affecting Learners' Motivation in E-learning

The world is changing rapidly, so is academics. E-learning has altered the area of academics and education. ICT enabled learning has given ideal services to students by providing any type of content on demand which is proportional to the performance of students. The concentration of learner has been found instinctive; thus there is a need of engaging mind towards course progress with its entirety till the objectives of the course will be achieved. There are several e-learning platforms available as EdX, Udacity, Khan Academy, Alison those have a number of learners registered for various courses. Studies suggest that these platforms suffer from the common problem of learners’ dropping out. Investigations also claim early leaving rate is increasing due to lack of quality of content, distraction factors, learners’ mind change, outdated and succinct information, and some more detraction factors. These issues have been observed on the basis of early leaving rates in various MOOCs. Thus there is a mammoth scope for minimizing the impact of these reasons on the learners’ mind. It can be achieved by identifying these factors affecting learners’ motivation during the course. This study is aiming on identifying these factors. The approach is to explore some certain keywords on previous literature (total 41) and then calculating their frequencies and co-factors associated with them. Both grouped factors contribution and individual factor contribution have been taken care. The study gives a direction for future work towards overcoming these actor and engaging learners in ICT enabled learning.

Flanker paradigm contains conflict and distraction factors with distinct neural mechanisms: an ERP analysis in a 2-1 mapping task.

Behavioral studies using the flanker 2-1 mapping task suggest that both stimulus and response conflicts contribute to flanker conflict effect. However, both are intertwined with distraction effect. Their underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. We applied a perceptual flanker 2-1 mapping task to 24 healthy young adults, while the event-related potentials were recorded. The task included stimulus-incongruent (SI), response-incongruent (RI), congruent (CO) and neutral (NE) stimuli. Our reaction time datademonstrated conflict effect, distraction effect and their interaction. Furthermore, the conflict factor successively enhanced the frontal P2 (160-240ms), the posterior N2pc (200-240ms), the fronto-central and the right frontal N2b (240-420ms), and the posterior N2c (320-420ms). Only the frontal P2 was larger for RI than SI. The distraction factor increased the right N2pc and reduced the left parietal P3b (460-480ms). Overall, our findings suggested that the flanker conflict involved an early attentional processing of task-relevant and distractive information, and a later processing of conflict evaluation and response inhibition.

The Effect of Interventions Based on Behavioral Change Modeling in Traffic Injuries ‎Prevention: A Review Study

Background: Behavioral change models in health education and health promotion are used to create and ‎modify various behaviors. The purpose of this study is to examine patterns used in traffic and ‎promote safe behaviors.‎ Methods: In this overview, databases including PubMed, Medline, Since Direct, SID and Google scholar ‎were searched using the keywords pedestrians, drivers, riders, traffic, safe behaviors, models ‎Health promotion, health education, intervention and behavior change among the articles ‎published in last 10 years. ‎ Results: After the final review of the retrieved articles, 36 studies based on health promotion models ‎‎(Both interventional and non-interventional) were included which was 18 for Iran. The most ‎used model was the theory of planned behavior (25 cases) and then the health belief model (5 ‎cases). In this study, the target group was 19 drivers, 3 were motorcyclists and 14 were ‎pedestrians. In driving studies, more health education models have been used to utilize seat ‎belts and distraction factors and health education models were used more often in motorcyclists ‎to use helmets and pedestrians in relation to safe behaviors. ‎ Conclusion: If health education and health promotion models are used effectively to change behavior, it is ‎possible to reduce crashes and create safe behaviors for all road users.‎

Distraction behaviors of pedestrians in the city of Tabriz

Background: Traffic accidents represent the greatest economic burden across the world. Pedestrian behaviors are very important due to the higher risk of road injuries among them, the purpose of this study was to investigate of the Traffic Safety behavior of Pedestrians in Tabriz city. Methods: This study was a cross-sectional study to data were collected by observation and checklist. In this study, the statistical population was all pedestrians in Tabriz 2nd district to 557 pedestrian through census method and filming on a daily basis for six days and certain hours for 15 minutes of filming from any intersections were studied. After filming, the information was extracted from the checklist and analyzed using soft spss22. Results: In this study, most people were in the age group of approximately 18-34 years (61.6%) And male pedestrians were more than women (55.1%). According to the findings of this study, 24.3 percent of pedestrians crossed the street, regardless of traffic signs and 20.6% when crossing the intersection and the street had at least one type of distraction (mobile, hand-held, etc.) The most common cause of distraction was talking with a friend (11.3%) and then using mobile (3.6%). And overall 13.5 percent of pedestrians had unsafe traffic behavior during the crossing of the street that 8.1% of them were accompanied by a type of distraction. Also, according to the findings of this study, there was a significant relationship between distraction and unsafe behavior and age group with pedestrian distraction (p <.05). Conclusion: By identifying the factors associated with unsafe traffic behaviors and the role of distraction factors in the unsafe behaviors of pedestrians, Behavioral and educational interventions should be used to promote safe pedestrian behavior and to change the pedestrian -related rules.

Factors Associated with Student Performance in Business Finance: An Empirical Study at a US Private Residential College

Of the motivation factors studied (intended grade, intention to take Professional Certification exams, and intention to attend graduate school), the first two are significantly associated with student performance. None of the distraction factors (job hours, job type, and course load) has any significant negative effect on student performance. All prior ability factors (grades in financial accounting and macroeconomics courses, and GPA) have significant association with the student performance. Finally, from the self perceived ability factors (writing, math, reading, and listening), extra-curricular activities (internship, and participation in student organization,) and major, only math ability and major have significant association with student performance.

Relationship between classroom plan types and the degree of concentration of the children in elementary schools: A comparative study of open‐plan classrooms and conventional‐plan classrooms

AbstractIn this study, the authors collected the data of 229 classrooms in 15 municipal elementary schools in a city, and sorted them into 5 categories according to the degree of openness of the classrooms in the design of borders between classroom and hallway. First, the authors examined the influence of 5 major factors on the degree of concentration of the children during classwork. As a result, the following were found: (1) the degree of concentration of the children is influenced by the classroom plan type and the number and ratio of children in the class who require special supports, and is neither affected by teaching experience of the teacher nor the total number of the children in the class. (2) The general trend of concentration of children in full‐open classrooms does not differ significantly from that in conventional classrooms. However, in the classrooms equipped with movable partition panels for partially separating the classroom from the hallway, it is significantly lower than in the classrooms of other types. The factors of distraction in physical environments were then further analyzed and discussed.

The Impact of Using Modern Information and Communication Equipment and Services on Driving Safety

With the development and application of modern information and communication equipment and services (ICES), global society has undergone significant development and progress in everyday life. Along with the positive, negative aspects of their usage have evolved. One of the problems is the new sources of driver distraction, which ultimately results in a serious, growing daily threat to traffic safety. Simultaneously with the development of ICES, the number of distracters (mobile terminal devices, laptops, smart watches, and others) has increased as well, which also reduces the level of safety and affects the quality of driving. With the increase in participation and ownership of mobile terminal devices, as well as the implementation of modern multimedia information and communication systems in vehicles, this problem will further escalate in the coming years. The unfavorable factor comes from the fact that distraction factors influenced by using ICES belong to bio-mechanical, cognitive, auditory, and visual categories, which directly affects essential human functions for successful and safe vehicle operation. This paper provides insight into the issue of distraction factors that affect drivers with an emphasis on those caused by using modern ICES.

Hierarchical Contextual Refinement Networks for Human Pose Estimation.

Predicting human pose in the wild is a challenging problem due to high flexibility of joints and possible occlusion. Existing approaches generally tackle the difficulties either by holistic prediction or multi-stage processing, which suffer from poor performance for locating challenging joints or high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a new Hierarchical Contextual Refinement Network (HCRN) to robustly predict human poses in an efficient manner, where human body joints of different complexities are processed at different layers in a context hierarchy. Different from existing approaches, our proposed model predicts positions of joints from easy to difficult in a single stage through effectively exploiting informative contexts provided in the previous layer. Such approach offers two appealing advantages over state-of-the-arts: (1) more accurate than predicting all the joints together and (2) more efficient than multi-stage processing methods. We design a Contextual Refinement Unit (CRU) to implement the proposed model, which enables auto-diffusion of joint detection results to effectively transfer informative context from easy joints to difficult ones. In this way, difficult joints can be reliably detected even in presence of occlusion or severe distracting factors. Multiple CRUs are organized into a tree-structured hierarchy which is end-to-end trainable and does not require processing joints for multiple iterations. Comprehensive experiments evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed HCRN model to improve well-established baselines and achieve new state-of-the-art on multiple human pose estimation benchmarks.

A multiplayer online car racing virtual-reality game based on internet of brains

Abstract Development of brain-computer interface (BCI)-controlled virtual reality (VR) games has received increasing attention. Yet, the up-to-date BCI-VR systems were still based on one single BCI and a virtual environment (VE). In this paper, we propose and implement a novel BCI-controlled VR (BCI-VR) game based on a structure of internet of brains (IoB) allowing multiple players from different sites to play a car racing game online. Electroencephalographic (EEG) and electromyographic (EMG) signals from different sites’ BCIs are uploaded to a high-performance cloud server where the car-controlled algorithms are performed. During the online car racing period, the players mentally control the speeds of their chosen cars by means of concentration, and the concentration level can be adjusted by performing a mental arithmetic (MA) task with different levels of difficulty. Two linear and two nonlinear EEG features, including theta band power (BP), beta BP, Higuchi's fractal dimension (HFD), and Katz's FD (KFD), are used to transform the concentration level to speeds of four different cars. The players can also sensitively trigger the car in the VE to jump by performing a slight teeth-gritting task to generate easy-to-detect EMG signals. Six subjects participated in this study to test the performance of the proposed hybrid (EEG plus EMG) BCI-VR car racing game. The results indicate that theta BP and HFD are more sensitive to the MA-induced concentration in comparison with beta BP and KFD. Through the test of online car racing game, the results also demonstrated the feasibility that different players play the game in the same VE through multiple BCI control at different sites. More importantly, our BCI-VR implementation has a high usability (only two electrodes are required; calibration needs only 64 s) and high feasibility (high average scores of the control, sensory, and distraction factors in a 30-item post-experimental presence questionnaire).