Over half of all road accidents are caused by either lack of driver attention or insufficient gap between vehicles, with collision from the rear being the most common cause in the UK. Yet these accidents should be among the most avoidable since brake lights are designed to clearly indicate to a following driver that a vehicle is slowing down or stopping.

Brake lamps historically used incandescent bulbs, but LEDs are attractive to manufacturers and are becoming increasingly common. Vehicles are increasingly being fitted with unusual and interesting shapes and patterns for their brake lamps. However very little research has been conducted to date on assessing the effectiveness of brake light design, and almost none have considered the effect on brain perception. Since a brake light must be noticed before it can be acted upon, and with so many accidents caused by inattention, the perception of new light designs is an extremely important and timely study, which is the focus of this project.

This research provides an augmented method for evaluating brake light efficacy, taking into account not only the braking time latencies that a pair of brake lights can elicit, but also the time latencies and amplitudes of the event-related potentials that are perceptually evoked in the brain signal of a driver.