Decision letter: Foggy perception slows us down
2012
The ways people respond to conditions of reduced visibility is a central topic in vision research. Notably, it has been shown that people tend to underestimate speeds when visibility is reduced equally at all distances, as for example, when driving with a fogged up windshield. But what happens when the visibility decreases as you look further into the distance, as happens when driving in fog? Fortunately, as new research reveals, people tend to overestimate their speed when driving in fog-like conditions, and show a natural tendency to drive at a slower pace. Pretto et al. performed a series of experiments involving experienced drivers and high-quality virtual reality simulations. In one experiment, drivers were presented with two driving scenes and asked to guess which scene was moving faster. In the reference scene, the car was driving at a fixed speed through a landscape under conditions of clear visibility; in the test scene, it was moving through the same landscape, again at a fixed speed, but with the visibility reduced in different ways. The experiments showed that drivers overestimated speeds in fog-like conditions, and they underestimated speeds when the reduction in visibility did not depend on distance. Further experiments confirmed that these perceptions had an influence on driving behaviour: drivers recorded an average speed of 85.1 km/hr when the visibility was good, and this dropped to 70.9 km/hr in severe fog. However, when visibility was reduced equally at all distances, as happens with a fogged up windshield, the average driving speed increased to 101.3 km/hr. Based on previous work, Pretto et al. developed the theory that the perception of speed is influenced by the relative speeds of the visible regions in the scene. When looking directly into the fog, visibility is strongly reduced in the distant regions, where the relative motion is slow, and is preserved in the near regions, where the motion is fast. This visibility gradient would lead to speed overestimation. To test this theory, the experiments were repeated with new drivers under three different conditions: good visibility, fog, and an artificial situation called ‘anti-fog’ in which visibility is poor in the near regions and improves as the driver looks further into the distance. As predicted, the estimated speed was lower in anti-fog than in clear visibility and fog. Conversely, the driving speed was 104.4 km/hr in anti-fog compared with 67.9 km/hr in good visibility and 51.3 km/hr in fog. Overall, the results show that the perception of speed is influenced by spatial variations in visibility, and they strongly suggest that this is due to the relative speed contrast between the visible and covert areas within the scene.