The effect of red light interface patterns on driver’s temporal experience

The red traffic light is very likely to influence both peoples’ emotion and behavior while walking and driving. The research objective is to shorten the drivers’ or pedestrians’ duration estimation and improve their emotional experience while waiting for a red light by testing several decreasing patterns of the red traffic light. This research, including two experiments, adopted the verbal estimation method to test the participants’ duration estimation and emotion in different levels of duration, shape, speed and division. The results revealed that the main effects of the shape and the speed were significant, especially the inverted-trapezoid and the deceleration which got the best performance in all conditions while the rectangle and the constant speed were the worst. In addition, the main effect of the division showed non-significance in affecting the duration estimation while the degree of calmness was affected significantly. In conclusion, the three factors and the mutual correlations affected the participants' temporal experience significantly, and the results varied at different levels.