An Exploration of Prosocial Aspects of Communication Cues between Automated Vehicles and Pedestrians

Road traffic is a social situation where participants heavily interact with each other. Consequently, communication plays an important role. Typically, the communication between pedestrians and drivers is nonverbal and consists of a combination of gestures, eye contact, and body movement. However, when vehicles become automated, this will change. Previous work has investigated the design and effectiveness of additional communication cues between pedestrians and automated vehicles. It remains unclear, though, how this impacts the perceptions of the quality of communication and impressions of mindfulness and prosociality. In this paper, we report an online experiment, where we evaluated the perception of communication cues in the form of on-road light projections, across different traffic scenarios and roles. Our results indicate that, while the cues can improve communication, their effect is dependent on traffic scenarios. These results provide preliminary implications for the design of communication cues that consider their prosocial aspects.