The performances of elderly drivers when using narrow road driving assistance systems were compared with those of young drivers in terms of driving behavior, eye movement and subjective evaluation. In the experiment utilizing a driving simulator, the subjects were required to pass along a narrow road which consisted of two parked vehicles and eight telegraph poles. The assistance systems were designed to provide the subjects with two types of interfaces: one system shows the relation among the driver's vehicle, the obstacles and a recommended route on an in-vehicle display and another system shows the information as to the recommended steering operations for driving along the recommended route on a head-up display in addition to the information on the in-vehicle display. The results imply that elderly drivers could not benefit from the information on the in-vehicle display while driving along the narrow road because of deterioration of visual functions and cognitive overload. However, when the system showing the information as to the recommended steering operations on the head-up display in addition to the information shown on the in-vehicle display was used, the elderly drivers could benefit from the assistance information because the visual strategy and the drivers' cognitive process were improved.

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The effectiveness of a steering switch was verified based on the spatial relationship between the control and the display. The primary experimental task was a tracking task. The secondary experimental tasks included the control of an air conditioner, the operation of a radio, and the operation of a CD/MD. The control was conducted using either a steering switch or a traditional left panel switch. The display was arranged either in front of or on the left side of a participant. First, a single tracking task was continued for 2min. After the completion of a single tracking task, a single secondary task was conducted for each experimental condition (four combinations of control and display). Finally, the conditions under which both the primary tracking task and the secondary task were simultaneously conducted were established. The effectiveness of steering switches was evaluated using six measures: tracking error, secondary task completion time, percentage correct in a secondary task, amount of switch pressing in a secondary task, mental workload evaluation by NASA-TLX, and head movements along x^-, y^-, and z-axis. Five of the six measures, except for percentage correct, supported the effectiveness of a steering switch. How the steering switch interacts with the display system was also clarified. The display in front of a participant enhanced the efficiency of steering switch more than that on the left side of a participant. In conclusion, we found that the steering switch enhances the performance in man-vehicle systems by shortening the secondary task completion time and prevents inattentive driving.

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This study proposes an analysis method for viewers' intentions during viewing of television commercials applying eye-tracking technique. A viewer's intention is referred to as an implicit intention that are involved, but not recognized by a viewer during watching of television commercials. In the proposed method, the intentions are estimated by comparing the hypothetical watching sequence expected to be found in a viewer with a specific intention with a real viewer's watching sequence. The estimation is carried out based on the two measurements (coincidence rates of scan-paths and effective gaze ratio). We performed an experiment with 7 subjects to verify feasibility of the proposed method. The results obtained from the experiment seemed to show that the proposed method could identify the subjects' intentions. In addition, a series of experiments was performed with 16 subjects to analyse viewers' behaviours during exposing to 2 insurance companies' commercials. Overall, we found that the subjects tended to be more oriented towards one of the exposed television commercials. The subjects also showed that they tended to see the commercials with the intention of comprehending events/story occurring in scenes, and did not show any intention of comprehending the advertised insurance services. Finally, we obtained indications concerning factors affecting memory accuracy of advertised brands.

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The eye movement tracking type image display system can present a high resolution image with wide view angle even though using the NTSC displays in the equivalent by presenting the high resolution image in a small area in the gaze point on the wide and low resolution image. Human can see an object as a high-resolution image only near the viewpoint. Therefore, he/she can feel that the displayed image is wide view angle and high resolution. This paper describes acceptable display time delay of high-resolution image which is followed with eye movement is investigated experimentally. In the experiments, striped patterns with a different spatial frequency were used. The high-resolution images were presented with various time delays at the gaze point on the wide and low resolution images to several subjects. Each subject was asked if he/she can feel that the image is presented with high resolution after eye movement. As a result, display time delay was determined under the conditions of several image resolutions. Based on this function, one of the designs for the eye movement tracking image display system using NTSC display device was shown.

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To study the relation between the sewing pattern and learning characteristics, the way to acquire learning was tested using relative difficulty of three kinds of sewing forms. To analyze the results, we applied a work achievement method so that we could easily evaluate the learning. The results could be summarized as follows; (1) The level of learning characteristics of each worker was analyzed according to the relation between the sewing pattern and the work achievement, inspected it about the effectiveness. (2) Learning according to the differences in the sewing patterns was evaluated by work achievement Q. As a result, Q tended to decrease in the order of work I (a straight line), work II (a curve), work III (a ring) according to the increasing level of difficulty. (3) Upon obtaining the correlation coefficient r for the relations of various characteristic values in the tendency equation, the correlation could be deemed significant at a significance level of 1% or 5% in all variations of the sewing pattern. This showed that a smaller number of parameters would be available to predict a dispersion state of work time. (4) Presented herein are those indicators, which could enable us to evaluate learning with rate of work achievement Q as variability δ from tendency index b.

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