Design and Evaluation of a Virtual Reality-based Driving Task to Investigate Temporal Preparation

Abstract

Implicit timing is one of the less investigated components of humen’s time perception. In particular, temporal preparation, which means reduced reaction time to act before an expected event , has not received enough attention in the previous studies. The focus of this study is to design and validate a Virtual Reality (VR)-based driving task to examine this important aspect of implicit timing. During the VR test, the participants were expected to implicitly learn the time between the yellow light and red light being shown to them in the virtual street at three different intervals(i.e. 2, 5, 8s). We hypothesized that the young adults ,with no sex differences, can successfully form their temporal expectancies in our task by showing a significant decline in their reaction times. Participants were 27 young adults (14 females). The average absolute error for each target interval was calculated based on the participants’ reaction times. Wilcoxon Signed rank test and Mann–Whitney U test were used for eliciting the difference between the experimental conditions and sex groups respectively. Our results confirm the significant reduction in absolute errors of the participants' reaction times for longer time intervals(5 and 8 s) with no difference between males and females.