# Operationalizing Dyadic Urban Traffic Interaction Studies: From Theory to Practice
## 4 Results: Aspects of Traffic Interaction Study Design Warranting Trade-Offs
### Measures
The lack of control over the independent variable and the presence of many confounding factors can make it challenging to isolate the specific impact of a stimulus on reaction time. Secondly, while eye tracking is a powerful tool for understanding where participants direct their attention, it does not always correlate directly with situational awareness (SA). The phenomenon of \"looked but failed to see\" [53] illustrates this limitation--participants may physically look at an object or scenario but may not process it meaningfully, leading to discrepancies between where their eyes are pointed and what they actually perceive or are aware of. Analyzing decisions made by participants can reveal how they respond to specific scenarios, but does not provide insights into the underlying reasons for those decisions. And lastly, methods such as passive observation & coding or real-time psychological monitoring might be affected by experimenter bias, and might not reflect or elucidate the underlying reasons behind specific participant behavior. Without understanding the motivations or cognitive processes that drive decision making, it is difficult to use these data to infer deeper behavioral patterns or to predict future behaviors under different conditions. Moreover, the analysis must be designed to handle the complexity of these data, acknowledging that simple causal inferences are often insufficient. In response to these challenges, it is crucial for studies to employ a suitable combination of measures and to integrate qualitative insights where possible. For instance, incorporating follow-up interviews or questionnaires can help elucidate the reasoning behind participants' decisions, providing context that quantitative measures alone might miss. To address this, it becomes necessary to ask participants directly. This interrogation can be conducted in various forms, such as after or during the interaction, each with its own implications. Post-interaction interviews, i.e., asking participants to recall their experiences and decisions after the fact can lead to issues with memory decay or recall bias. Participants might forget details or reconstruct their memories inaccurately. On the other hand, real-time interrogation, i.e., interrupting the interaction to ask participants about their awareness can provide more immediate and potentially accurate responses. However, this method can disrupt the flow of the interaction and take people out of the scenarios both experientially and cognitively, potentially altering the naturalness of their behavior and affecting the results. For example, one of the critical challenges is accurately measuring participants' workload, emotional state, situational awareness, and attitudes without compromising the naturalistic integrity of the scenarios. Tools like the NASA-TLX [54] (workload and cognitive effort), SAM [55] (emotion and valence), and SAGAT [56] (situation awareness) provide structured methods to query participants' awareness at specific moments by pausing the scenario and asking targeted questions. However, this approach has significant trade-offs in terms of naturalism, as it can disrupt the flow of interaction and remove participants from the immersive experience of the scenario. An alternative approach is to use an in-situ tool that allows querying the desired metric without disrupting the immersion of the experience and preserving naturalism. Examples for such tools for the case of situation awareness include the Daze methodology proposed by [PERSON] et al. [57] or SPAM (SituationPresent Assessment Method) [58], which uses a more seamless questioning technique in a continuous manner. Employing other efficient questioning techniques such as auto- and allo-confrontation during review of video replay of interactions [59] can help balance the depth of interrogation with the need to keep the scenarios running smoothly--participants can reflect on their or others' actions and attitudes by watching their performance, which can mitigate some of the issues with memory-based distortions.