A trade-off effect: Comparing impacts of a variety of freeway landscapes on drivers' driving performance and self-reported mental status

Abstract

Driving on the freeway is a daily but unhealthy activity for tens of millions of people worldwide. Although plenty of studies examined on safety issues of the freeway system, what they rarely investigated is impacts of freeway landscapes on driver’s mental states. This experimental study used driving simulation system and visual-analog scale questionnaire as main instruments. We compared 32 subjects' driving performance and self-reported mental status during their driving on an identical freeway with six different types of landscapes which include barren, turf, shrub regular, shrub random, tree regular, and tree random. The results show the shrub random yields the best objectively measured performance and the tree regular yields the best self-reported psycho-physiological status. The findings suggest a trade-off effect: Impacts of landscapes on performance and mental status are optimal when a landscape is not at two extreme conditions: low information load/monotonous (barren) and high information load/diverse (tree random) landscape.