Every time that you step out of the house, the difference between life and death is,
in part, entrusted in a group of rectangular, triangular and octagonal pieces of metal.
It's a sign... I've had road signs on my mind lately because I keep driving over
words on the road. In transport lingo, they're called road surface markings, that say this:
Now take a moment to read these words. What does this road marking say?
Leave a comment with what you read here to see if it's the same or different to others.
I've always read this as "lane one form", obviously not the form one lane as intended.
I'd never mentioned this before and when I did and started a debate in my family.
So just like the dress, which was blue, and yanny and Laurel. Laurel which was Laurel,
if I perceive something a certain way, others must too,
right? We're diving into the design and psychology of traffic signs.
Because when I tried to settle the for one lane debate, I discovered that road signs, such bad
signs are everywhere. And when some design choices and some brains meet, everything can fall apart.
This video is sponsored by Wondrium. Get your free trial at wondrium.com/braincraft.
Traffic signs are hundreds of years old. The oldest one we know of is this marble
plaque in Portugal that has a lot of words. Despite this, you may not have
spent a lot of time thinking about them, but traffic signs are super important.
Car crashes are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death globally. And signs
can help reduce the number of accidents. They can literally save lives. When you see a sign in, your
brain is processing a bunch of different things, the color, shape, icons and words,
these all add up to guide us, to do something, to cue our behavior, to stop, give way or slow down.
Prof Krishna: As human beings, we've been programed to sort of respond to road signs.
This is Professor Aradhna Krishna from the University of Michigan,
who, to my delight, is passionate about signs.
I'm glad somebody cares about road signs
From a psychology perspective, road or traffic signs are an implicit cue,
something we react to without awareness. This is influenced by color:
Red and green has become implicitly ingrained in us that when we see green,
it's sort of a go signal and when we see a red sign and become a stop signal in everything.
Quick side note, it's thought stop signs of red because an English guy suggested that
color scheme for railroad signs in the 1800s. Thanks, Henry? Apart from color,
we're influenced by shape. Stop signs are universal octagons, rules are circular,
warnings tend to be yellow diamonds and blue rectangles are mostly informational.
These implicit cues are important because we don't always consciously notice signs.
You can have your eyes on the road, but your mind off the road all at the same time.
So a lot of signs work together to prepare our brains: you see one, and then another and another.
Now, this is called priming. Exposure to one stimulus, or one thing, kind of like this sign,
affects our reaction to the next thing or the next stimulus, like the actual stop sign.
So the way that we interact with signs is implicit. They guide our behavior,
a level that we're not even consciously aware of. And this is why good sign design is so important.
Signs need to work in a way that guide our behavior in split seconds when we're on autopilot,
daydreaming or barely paying attention. So if signs aren't super clear or able
to be understood quickly, they're going to lead to confused drivers or just be ignored.
Bad road signs that fall into a few categories. The icons that leave a
bit too much to the imagination. The words that don't indicate what to do. Those that contradict
themselves or those that aren't clear because they're a bit too...
artistic. Although the intention of road signs is to be as clear as possible,
there's another factor that contributes to how comprehensible they are, and that is you.
What's clear to one person might not be clear to another,
and things like your life experience, how your brain works, and even your age
all contribute. Older drivers need more time to identify traffic signs, and they don't identify
newer signs as accurately as younger drivers. So maybe give those slow grannies a break? As well as
newer signs, those that are really hard for some people to process are signs with too much text.
In a driving simulator study, students were tested on two things: what a sign means,
and what hazard might occur if the sign is not obeyed.
Researchers found that those who scored higher on measures of dyslexia performed worse in both
categories and performed worse comprehending text only signs compared to picture signs as
well. Another study found that receiving an audio message with a variable text sign
was more effective for people with dyslexia than just seeing the text sign by itself.
Given that dyslexia affects 20% of the population, the way that some traffic signs are designed
aren't inclusive because they're not designed for everyone. So in a world of bad road signs,
how can sign design be better? Moving from fewer text signs to more picture signs is a start,
but some picture signs are better than others. Most road signs with pictures
or icons use a kind of static image, and they make us aware.
But what if they could make us alert? Professor Krishna and
colleagues ran an experiment where they designed a bunch of different signs.
So we have the stimuli where one of the images was more static and one was more dynamic.
This change was as simple as tweaking the stride of a horse or the angle of a seesaw.
And the first thing we did was we said, Do they notice the sign with the movement earlier?
Using eye tracking, they measured people's responses and found that,
yeah, we do notice signs with movement earlier than signs without.
And then the next question was if they're noticing it earlier, do they react faster?
So will they slam on the brakes faster if they need to? Or will they stop further
back from the stop sign? And so we created a driving simulation.
And they found that people do react faster with dynamic signs.
When there is movement, you notice it earlier because danger means movement. In signs,
the movement works better because we are evolutionarily tuned to notice them.
What I haven't been tuned to notice is this road marking fiasco. So you may be wondering
,what is going on with Lane one form?
I'm just seeing this for the first time.
Alie Caldwell: I read it like I would read a page in a book. It says Lane one form. But after like
a second glance, it's clear you're supposed to be reading it as you're approaching, form one lane.
It's creative, but I don't know functionally good it is.
In the case of Lane one form, it comes down to my
brain reading from top to bottom. I can't adjust reading bottom to top.
We've trained our brains to read top to bottom, right? And if you're an English speaker,
if you read English, you're reading left to right, top to bottom. That's how our language
is processed visually when we're reading. In this case, the designers were thinking,
Oh, well, if you're moving quickly, it'll be easier if you read it from bottom to top.
But your brain's not just going to make that adjustment. Your brain is automatically going
to default to the way that you have learned how to read that language.
Think about how you read the Star Wars opening text. The way it moves just makes sense,
right? It'd be pretty difficult to read it from bottom to top.
If you had to rate this sign on a scale of one to ten,
ten being excellently designed and one being very poorly designed, where would you place it?
I would give it maybe two because it's creative
I couldn't find any reasoning about why road marking words are painted from bottom to top.
Maybe just like the red stop signal, a guy called Henry decided it was just a good idea
and it stuck. But road signs and markings are something we need to be more intentional about
in the future. Researchers found that small changes to traffic signs resulted
in self-driving cars perceiving them to be completely different.
They had the stop sign. It was a regular stop sign that had like four or five pieces
of reflective tape put on it in what looks to me like a completely random pattern. To us,
this just looks like a stop sign with tape on it. To a self-driving car.,
the stop sign says 35 miles per hour. A car is never going to be able to think like a human.
But for now, for signs to better guide all of our human brains through the world,
they need to be designed with more motion, fewer words, and perhaps a text that is
intended to be read from top to bottom. Making signs more effective for everyone
would actually also make them more accessible to people with dyslexia. And maybe grandma, too.
I find road signs so fascinating because they're a great example of how we navigate through the world
below the level of our conscious awareness. You probably haven't spent much time actually thinking
about road signs, but I think that we should think about them and talk about them more often
and bring them into public awareness. It's the first step in actually combating bad sign design.
Here's to hoping bad signs become a thing of the past, something we can all rant and
reminisce about on memory lane. If you'd like to learn more about how your brain processes words,
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I have a feeling that your brain is going to love this place.
I started filming this video when I was in Sydney over the summer. I didn't finish it,
came to New York City and realized that they only have the from one lane
road marketing in Australia, which makes me wonder why.
Curious about what signs you might have in your country
that on in other countries or things that you've noticed because when
you truly pay attention to signs, see some pretty confusing and bad things.