Objective: There is considerable evidence for the negative effects of driver distraction on road safety. In many experimental studies, drivers have been primarily viewed as passive receivers of distraction. Thus, there is a lack of research on the mediating role of their self-regulatory behavior. The aim of the current study was to compare drivers' performance when engaged in a system-paced secondary task with a self-paced version of this task and how both differed from baseline driving performance without distraction.
Methods: Thirty-nine participants drove in a simulator while performing a secondary visual–manual task. One group of drivers had to work on this task in predefined situations under time pressure, whereas the other group was free to decide when to work on the secondary task (self-regulation group). Drivers' performance (e.g., lateral and longitudinal control, brake reaction times) was also compared with a baseline condition without any secondary task.
Results: For the system-paced secondary task, distraction was associated with high decrements in driving performance (especially in keeping the lateral position). No effects were found for the number of collisions, probably because of the lower driving speeds while distracted (compensatory behavior). For the self-regulation group, only small impairments in driving performance were found. Drivers engaged less in the secondary task during foreseeable demanding or critical driving situations.
Conclusions: Overall, drivers in the self-regulation group were able to anticipate the demands of different traffic situations and to adapt their engagement in the secondary task, so that only small impairments in driving performance occurred. Because in real traffic drivers are mostly free to decide when to engage in secondary tasks, it can be concluded that self-regulation should be considered in driver distraction research to ensure ecological validity. 相似文献
Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in the secondary effluent discharged from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are of great concern in the process of water reuse. Ozonation has been reported as a powerful oxidation technology to eliminate micropollutants in water treatment. Due to the complexity of the wastewater matrix, orthogonal experiments and single factor experiments were conducted to study the influence of operational parameters on the degradation of 17αup-ethinylestradiol (EE2) in the synthetic secondary effluent. The results of the orthogonal experiments indicated that the initial ozone and natural organic matter (NOM) concentration significantly affected EE2 degradation efficiency, which was further validated by the single factor confirmation experiments. EE2 was shown to be effectively degraded by ozonation in the conditions of low pH (6), NOM (10 mg/L), carbonate (50 mg/L), but high suspended solid (20 mg/L) and initial ozone concentration (9 mg/L). The study firstly revealed that the lower pH resulted in higher degradation of EE2 in the synthetic secondary effluent, which differed from EDCs ozonation behavior in pure water. EE2 degradation by ozone molecule instead of hydroxyl radical was proposed to play a key role in the degradation of EDCs by ozonation in the secondary effluent. The ratio between O3 and TOC was identified as an appropriate index to assess the degradation of EE2 by ozonation in the synthetic secondary effluent. 相似文献
Multiphase acid-catalyzed oxidation by hydrogen peroxide has been suggested to be a potential route to secondary organic aerosol formation from isoprene and its gas-phase oxidation products, but the lack of kinetics data significantly limited the evaluation of this process in the atmosphere. Here we report the first measurement of the uptake of isoprene, methacrylic acid and methyl methacrylate into aqueous solutions of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. Isoprene cannot readily partition into the solution because of its high volatility and low solubility, which hinders its further liquid-phase oxidation. Both methacrylic acid and methyl methacrylate can enter the solutions and be oxidized by hydrogen peroxide, and steady-state uptake was observed with the acidity of solution above 30 wt.% and 70 wt.%, respectively. The steady-state uptake coefficient of methacrylic acid is much larger than that of methyl methacrylate for a solution with same acidity. These observations can be explained by the different reactivity of these two compounds caused by the different electron-withdrawing conjugation between carboxyl and ester groups. The atmospheric lifetimes were estimated based on the calculated steady-state uptake coefficients. These results demonstrate that the multiphase acid-catalyzed oxidation of methacrylic acid plays a role in secondary organic aerosol formation, but for isoprene and methyl methacrylate, this process is not important in the troposphere. 相似文献