Abstract
A PC-based training program (Road Awareness and Perception Training or RAPT; Pradhan et al., 2009), proven effective for improving young novice drivers’ hazard anticipation skills, did not fully maximize the hazard anticipation performance of young drivers despite the use of similar anticipation scenarios in both, the training and the evaluation drives. The current driving simulator experiment examined the additive effects of expert eye movement videos following RAPT training on young drivers’ hazard anticipation performance compared to video-only and RAPT-only conditions. The study employed a between-subject design in which 36 young participants (aged 18–21) were equally and randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions, were outfitted with an eye tracker and drove four unique scenarios on a driving simulator to evaluate the effect of treatment on their anticipation skills. The results indicate that the young participants that viewed the videos of expert eye movements following the completion of RAPT showed significant improvements in their hazard anticipation ability (85%) on the subsequent experimental evaluation drives compared to those young drivers who were only exposed to either the RAPT training (61%) or the Video (43%). The results further imply that videos of expert eye movements shown immediately after RAPT training may improve the drivers’ anticipation skills by helping them map and integrate the spatial and tactical knowledge gained in a training program within dynamic driving environments involving latent hazards.
Highlights
The number of deaths per 100 million miles in the United states has declined to roughly one third in 2015 compared to 1980 among drivers overall [1]
The other measures of eye movements such as mean fixation duration and variability in fixation locations [16] and the mean travel speed did not differ across the conditions, suggesting that the benefit of the video of expert eye movements beyond the effect of Road Awareness and Perception Training (RAPT) is specific to the scenarios evaluated but the program may not alter their general scanning strategy while driving
How did the drivers in the RAPT-V condition achieve nearly ceiling-level performance in the evaluation drive? We speculate that, following the completion of RAPT, the videos with expert eye movements might have enabled the drivers to map the location of latent hazard that they learned and mastered in RAPT to a more dynamic driving environment
Summary
The number of deaths per 100 million miles in the United states has declined to roughly one third in 2015 compared to 1980 among drivers overall [1]. Various factors have been identified to influence young drivers’ driving behavior including experience, distraction, gender and cognition [2]. Research indicates that the elevated risk of crashes among young drivers can be largely attributed to their cognitive factors such as attention and decision making [3,4]. McKnight and McKnight [3] analyzed 1000 crashes involving young novice drivers and found that attentional and visual search failures contribute to more than. Other contributors such as adjusting speed (20.8%) and maintaining space (9.8%) that require active scanning of the driving scenes further underscore the criticality of appropriate scanning for young driver safety [5]
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