Abstract
We exhaustively review the published research on eye movements during real-world night driving, which is an important field of research as fatal road traffic accidents at night out-number fatal accidents during the daytime. Eye tracking provides a unique window into the underlying cognitive processes. The studies were interpreted and evaluated against the back-ground of two descriptions of the driving task: Gibson and Crooks’ description of driving as the visually guided selection of a driving path through the unobstructed field of safe travel; and Endsley’s situation awareness model, highlighting the influence of drivers’ interpreta-tions and mental capacities (e.g., cognitive load, memory capacity, etc.) for successful task performance. Our review unveiled that drivers show expedient looking behavior, directed to the boundaries of the field of safe travel and other road users. Thus, the results indicated that controlled (intended) eye movements supervened, but some results could have also reflected automatic gaze attraction by salient but task-irrelevant distractors. Also, it is not entirely certain whether a wider dispersion of eye fixations during daytime driving (compared to night driving) reflected controlled and beneficial strategies, or whether it was (partly) due to distraction by stimuli unrelated to driving. We concluded by proposing a more fine-grained description of the driving task, in which the contribution of eye movements to three different subtasks is detailed. This model could help filling an existing gap in the reviewed research: Most studies did not relate eye movements to other driving performance measurements for the evaluation of real-world night driving performance.
Highlights
In this article, we exhaustively review eye-tracking research on real-world night driving
In the present review we first summarize the major characteristics of the visual situation during night driving, and secondly, we analyze the task of driving
We first quickly review the major findings concerning different factors in turn and evaluate them against the background of driving models that we have presented in the Introduction
Summary
We exhaustively review eye-tracking research on real-world night driving. We used a systematic and exhaustive review of all existing eye-tracking research on real-world night driving to understand how much can be concluded from this research about the conditions of safe night driving. The ultimate goal is to identify and understand the conditions that facilitate or hinder safe, successful driving, this review is restricted to gaze behavior since eye movements provide a relatively universal window into many different cognitive processes underlying driving behavior (e.g., memory, decision making, action control, etc.). At least gaze directions during fixations and smooth pursuit eye movements are good approximations to the visual locations from which humans select information during driving. These two introductory chapters set the proper stage for the subsequent research review
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