Does familiarity breed competence or contempt? Effects of driver experience, road type and familiarity on hazard perception

Abstract

Driving is one of the most complex and dangerous tasks that is regularly performed by most adults. Whereas most research examines performance in novel situations, most everyday driving occurs in highly familiar settings, such as our daily commute. Here we compared drivers’ hazard identification on familiar roads with similar but unfamiliar roads, for five road types: city streets, suburban streets, urban roads, mountain roads, and motorways. Participants were 45 experienced drivers with on average 17.6 years driving experience ( SD = 5.2), and 32 novices with on average 6.2 months solo driving ( SD = 3.5). Experienced drivers identified more hazards than novices, regardless of road type, but the magnitude of the effect was surprisingly small. The overall effect of location familiarity on hazard identification was not statistically significant, but there were significant effects of road type and significant interactions between familiarity and road type, which suggests researchers should be cautious when generalizing results obtained from one road context to another.