Comment by nearbuy
4 days ago
Are you asking for the latency or throughput?
In humans, it's about 200–250 ms for a visual cue where you already know how to respond and you're ready, but you don't know exactly when it'll happen. It can be a fair bit longer if you need to identify what you see and choose how to respond. Typical perception to reaction time estimates for drivers when there's an unexpected hazard on the road are 1-2 seconds.
do you know what it is for non visual cue? like the gust of wind or unexpected jerk of the wheel from a road feature? both of those seem like more of a speed of proprioception which seems faster than visual and have way more to do with general "car control" in normal driving where the path is planned.
I would imagine it’s much less than this with muscle memory. Driving is a very habitual process. The human body is certainly able to “short circuit” its thinking and respond faster.
I mean, consider competitive video games. Humans who play a lot and pay attention respond to stimuli much faster than 250ms.
This is well studied by researchers, and 1-2s is the typical reaction time for real drivers with real muscle memory when reacting to an unexpected hazard on the road.
There are a lot of reasons people could sometimes react faster (for example, if they anticipate the hazard, or if they're just above average in reaction speed), but one to two seconds is the reaction speed we find most of the time.
The fastest human reactions aren't to unexpected road hazards. We have a much faster reaction speed in tests where you just have to click the mouse each time the screen flashes. Our reactions are fastest when you know in advance the event is about to happen. But this isn't relevant for road safety.
Your wording is kind of misleading. While the human reaction time to the unexpected is not great it's the human's ability to predict within reason what the likely next things to expect are expansive.
Like just running a first pass sanity analysis on the 1-2sec timeline fails because if it were true in practice all those idiots who screech about how normal traffic doesn't keep following distances worthy of semi trucks to the traffic ahead would be proven right as every braking event would cause a pile up. So either humans react much faster to the unexpected (not likely, we've measured) or humans have a huge "context window" for what to expect that makes the 1-2sec number not relevant in the base case.
2 replies →