A brief gamified immersive intervention to improve 11–14-year-olds’ cycling-related looking behaviour and situation awareness: A school-based pilot study

Abstract

Despite the health benefits of active travel, very few people in the UK choose to cycle short journeys; a frequently cited barrier is personal safety concerns. Recent research using immersive video-based training has shown promise, in terms of improving young children’s situation awareness and looking behaviour when cycling, although such evidence is sparse. We designed and delivered a brief gamified immersive intervention to address this. Forty-four schoolchildren took part in a 10-minute intervention comprising 360-degree real-world point-of-view footage of a cycle journey through a busy urban environment, experienced via a head-mounted display (HMD) with built-in eye tracking. The participants were split into two groups: an explicit learning group who received instructions regarding adaptive looking behaviour, and an implicit learning group who received no instructions. In a gamified protocol, participants scored points for fixating on target areas that represented adaptive looking behaviour; reward sounds notified them when they were successful. The explicit learning group accrued points more rapidly in the early stages of the intervention, but the implicit learning group matched the explicit group’s performance level by the end of the brief intervention. All participants’ cycling confidence increased after the brief intervention, and these increases were correlated with their performance in the game, but participants’ performance on video-based situation awareness tests did not improve. Brief gamified immersive interventions could be used to develop young cyclists’ competence, and therefore confidence, regarding cycling on roads, which could, in turn, encourage them to cycle short journeys.