The effect of visual degradation on anticipatory and compensatory steering control

It has long been held that steering a vehicle is subserved by two distinct visual processes, a compensatory one for maintaining lane position and an anticipatory one for previewing the curvature of the upcoming road. In this study, we investigated the robustness of these two steering control processes by systematically degrading their visual inputs. Performance was measured at the level of vehicle position and at the level of the actions on the steering wheel. The results show that the compensatory process is more robust to visual degradation than the anticipatory process. The results are also consistent with the idea that steering is under the supervision of a combination of compensatory and anticipatory mechanisms, although they suggest that the quality of the sensory information will determine how information is combined.