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Assurance of Confidentiality

All information will be kept completely confidential, your confidentiality is preserved at all times. Information you provide will not be shared or published without your permission. More »

Driving

The consequences of attention failures are usually amusing and irritating, as they generally take place in non-attention critical areas. However, when moving over 100 km/h in several thousand pounds of metal, a loss of attention could be deadly. This is why our research is initially being focused on several attention critical areas, to both help understand what causes attention failures, and to prevent these failures from causing serious accidents. Driving is one of the areas we have chosen to examine more closely, and it is by far the most common activity in which our failure to pay attention is likely to have catastrophic consequences.

Your attention failure reports help us to understand how attention failures are caused, and may help us prevent the damage and deaths caused by attention lapses while on the road. Due to the new territory our research is covering, every report is important, and all contributions are needed.

Our research studies the nature of everyday attention and memory failures and how they impact our daily lives. All our research is being conducted under the supervision of Dr. Dan Smilek, Department of Psychology of the University of Waterloo, Canada.

We appreciate your interest in our research and ask that you consider participating in it. If you decide to volunteer, you can fill out as many of our attention lapse reports or other questionnaires on our research page as you wish. Most of our questionnaires require only a few minutes to complete, and your responses to our attention lapse reports can be as sparse or detailed as you wish. For most questionnaires you will be asked to answer general background questions (for example, where you live and your age) but you can choose not to answer these questions if you wish, and you can withdraw your participation at any time by simply not submitting your responses or leaving the Oops! website entirely. There are no known or anticipated risks from participating in our research.

It is important for you to know that any information that you provide will be confidential. All of the data will be summarized and no individual could be identified from these summarized results. Furthermore, the web site is programmed to collect responses on the questionnaires alone; we do not collect any information that could potentially identify you (such as machine identifiers). For additional information on how we keep your data safe, please see our Confidentiality Statement.

Our research has been reviewed and received ethics clearance through the Office of Research Ethics at the University of Waterloo. Should you have any questions about our research, or would like to receive a copy of the results of our research please contact us. If you have any concerns resulting from your participation in our research, please feel free to contact Dr. Susan Sykes, Director, Office of Research Ethics, at 1-519-888-4567 x 36005, ssykes@uwaterloo.ca. For more information on how we keep your identity safe, please review our confidentiality statement.

Report an attention lapse

Psychology Department
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4567

Department of Psychology