Heesun Choi

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Texas Tech University

Motor vehicle crashes are the major cause of worker injuries and fatalities in the oil and gas industry. The current study uses an online survey to investigate driving safety and crash risk among the oil and gas industry workers. We examine driver characteristics and attentional and cognitive abilities associated with increased crash risks and eval...

With age-related changes in cognitive functioning including attention, older drivers experience increased crash risks and are particularly overrepresented in vehicle crashes in driving situations such as making a left turn and merging with traffic. Effective remedies via assessment, training, and interface design require understanding of individual...

[Background and Objectives] Mobility is a critical factor that influences older adults’ independence and well-being. Older drivers may experience increased crash risks due to age-related cognitive declines. Ensuring safe driving practices among older drivers is important to maintain their mobility without sacrificing safety. Investigations for an e...

Older drivers are known to face inordinate consequences from automobile crashes. Given that their presence is expected to climb in the near future, the field of human factors is currently in a unique position to help mitigate age-related issues on the road as technological advances are made. This chapter begins by examining the cognitive changes th...

Mind wandering has been considered as a mental process that is either independent from the concurrent task or regulated like a secondary task. These accounts predict that the form of mind wandering (i.e., images or words) should be either unaffected by or different from the modality form (i.e., visual or auditory) of the concurrent task. Findings f...

OBJECTIVES: The majority of existing investigations on attention, aging, and driving have focused on the negative impacts of age-related declines in attention on hazard detection and driver performance. However, driving skills and behavioral compensation may accommodate the negative effects that age-related attentional decline places on driving per...

Age differences in the spatial distribution of attention over a wide field of view have only been described in terms of the spatial extent, leaving the topographical aspect unexplored. This study examined age differences between younger and older adults in good general health in an important topographical characteristic, the asymmetry between the u...

Building a computational model for how the visual cortex identifies objects is a problem that has attracted much attention over the years. Generally, the interest has been in creating models that are translation, rotation, and luminance invariant. In this paper, we utilize the philosophy of Hough Transform to create a model for detecting straight l...

Age differences in the spatial distribution of attention over a wide field of view have only been described in terms of the spatial extent, leaving the topographical aspect unexplored. This study examined age differences between younger and older adults in good general health in an important topographical characteristic, the asymmetry between the u...

Age-related slowing of responses to cognitive tasks is a ubiquitous phenomenon in research on cognitive aging. The general slowing hypothesis is built upon broad observations in many studies of age-related slowing and suggests that age-related general slowing is the primary contributor to the declines in cognitive functioning associated with aging....

Human minds often wander around while performing a task. When the mind wanders, attention drifts away from task-relevant perceptual information, leading to deteriorated performance on the task at hand. The current study aims to examine how mind-wandering is associated with different aspects of attentional functions that are critical for perceptual...

Understanding when, why, where, and how to use human factors methods is a key skill for human factors practitioners. Experienced professionals are very skilled at selecting methods appropriate to the task at hand, but the skill is a result of years of exposure. The current study examines the value of organizing human factors methods into a framewor...

Older drivers experience increasing risks of vehicle crashes. This increase in crash risks has been associated with age-related declines in attention. To assess attentional failures during driving, we develop a self-report measure, the Attentional Failures during Driving Questionnaire (AFDQ). In this paper, we describe the development of the questi...

The current study aimed to understand the effects of playing video games on navigation skills, spatial cognitive abilities and speed of processing, and to examine the characteristics of games and training hours impacting video game training. Participants were assigned to one of four groups; First Person Shooter (FPS) game training group, Third Pers...

This study investigated behavioral characteristics of users with visual impairments and tested effect of factors regarding the layout of virtual environments (VEs). Various three-dimensional (3D) VEs were simulated with two different factors: number of objects and layout type (random, symmetric). Using a Novint Falcon haptic device, users with visu...