6533b7d3fe1ef96bd125fc27

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Benefit of an animated simulation device for learning the highway code for deaf candidates : behavioural and physiological evaluation

subject

description

In France, the law called “loi handicap”, adopted on February 11th 2005, aims to ensure that people with disabilities benefit from the same conditions of access as all French citizens. The driving licence, because of its contribution to mobility, represents one of the major levers of an individual's general accessibility. Its successful completion improves social and professional integration. However, according to a parliamentary report of 2005, the success rate of deaf candidates in the theoretical exam of the highway code, allowing access to the practical exam of the driving license, was lower than that of hearing people.This thesis focuses on one of the possible causes of these differences, the use of images to illustrate dynamic road situations. With such a presentation format, candidates would not have access to the spatiotemporal information needed to make an appropriate decision. In order to fill this gap, the mental inference of dynamism would then be necessary. However, this cognitive exercise could be even more complex for deaf people. Indeed, in the absence of hearing, temporal estimations would be less accurate.The use of a device based on an animation could solve these constraints. Thanks to this, the dynamism would be directly transmitted, avoiding the need to make its inference. In addition, the animation would allow deaf people to rely more easily on spatial cues to make temporal estimates, which could overcome their difficulties. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the animation, a decision making task involving road situations presented from pictures or an animation was developed. Participants had to estimate whether they had time to perform a driving action (e.g. overtaking a vehicle). Behavioral measures (i.e., number of errors and decision time) were first used to assess the performance associated with each type of presentation format. Secondly, physiological measures, derived from oculometric data (i.e., eye fixation and pupillary variation) and data associated with brain activity, were collected and analysed to better understand the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in an animation.The results obtained as a whole make it possible to evaluate the interest of animation within the highway code material and to provide broader pedagogical perspectives that can be adapted to other audiences or other learning contexts. In addition, these results also aim to refine the understanding of the cognitive system of deaf people in order to provide presentation materials that would be more adapted to them.