Highway Questions Experiment - Instructions

Please carefully read the instructions below.

In this experiment, you will be training an autonomous car (green car on the video) on the go, by answering simple comparison questions.

Setting. You are in a car which is autonomously driving in a four-lane highway. This is the first time you are in this car, so it does not really know how you want it to drive. It only knows two things: it should not have an accident, and it should stay within the speed limits, which in this case is 20 m/s minimum and 30 m/s maximum. You will see the speed of the car on the top left corner of the simulator screen.

Goal. Your goal is to train the car by answering some simple comparison questions so that it will learn your driving preferences and start driving in that way.

Procedure. You will train the car with 3 different conditions, each of which corresponds to a different algorithm for the car. But from your perspective, the procedures are the same. In each condition, you will train the car 5 times from scratch (so 3 conditions x 5 rounds = 15 round in total). In each round, the car will start at a random initial state in the highway. It will then either move or ask you a pairwise comparison question. Each question may consist of two actions out of the following five:

LEFT: Switch to one left lane.
RIGHT: Switch to one right lane.
FASTER: Speed up.
SLOWER: Slow down.
IDLE: Continue moving with the current speed in the current lane.

An example question is visualized below.

You should respond to each comparison question based on your driving preferences. If you were the driver at that state, which of the two actions would you prefer to take? You do not need to follow the standard conventions like "the leftmost lane is the fastest" (but you can also choose to do so!). Now, to make sure you are aware of some of the factors you should pay attention to, please fill this short pre-experiment survey about your driving preferences: https://forms.gle/83RDmWTzK35XUdSv5

The car may ask you multiple such comparison questions at the same state or may ask questions at different times. Each round takes 40 seconds. After a round is completed, we reset the car, and a new round begins, i.e., the car will completely forget your preferences.

Feel free to use the "Pause" button to pause the experiment at any time. You may also take breaks between the three conditions. However, please do not ever refresh the experiment page -- this will cause us to discard your data.

After each condition you will be asked to complete a post-condition survey which will ask you about the quality of the questions asked by the car and the overall driving performance. Now, please complete the 2-question quiz below to start the experiment.

Which of the following is true? My driving preferences in this experiment...
may include having accidents or going out of speed limits.
should only include the style of driving, e.g., which lane to follow, how close the car will get to the other cars, nominal speed, etc.
are random -- I just need the car to finish each round without having an accident.
Did you already complete the pre-experiment survey?
Yes!
No. (Please read the instructions carefully! The pre-experiment survey link is in the instructions.)