Discomfort glare and visual attention

This paper investigates covert attention in glare situations, which has important implications for night driving. A laboratory experiment is conducted with a setup close to Posner’s seminal paper on covert visual attention. Controlled glare conditions are added, with and without visual discomfort. Discomfort is found to degrade the reaction time in a peripheral target detection task, but other mechanisms are at work, as the spatial accuracy of gaze is improved with glare. Moreover, a dose effect of discomfort is found on the RT, and a general effect of glare is found on anticipation.