PATTERNS OF DRIVERS' ATTENTION CHANGES WHEN MOTION VIA URBAN STREETS IN THE EVENING TWILIGHT CONDITIONS

Abstract

The drivers receive about 90% of the information through the vision. The road illumination is high important for vision at night. A certain level of illumination is required in order for the eyes to recognize an object. When the brightness of an object is lower than the brightness of the background, or when the brightness of an obstruction is higher than the background’s brightness, objects can be recognized by silhouette. The drivers fraught with the greatest difficulties when the road illumination changes sharply in the conditions of low light driving. Traffic accidents at night are an important issue. Although the traffic volume is low (15-20%), 41-50% of traffic accidents happen at night. For the last years more attention has been paid to transport issues that can change the cognitive and emotional state of drivers. Therefore, assessing the driver’s vision may be useful in identifying a safe or dan-gerous type of behavior on the road. Eye tracking is used to measure drivers' perception of road elements, as well as developing driving strategies and accidents preventing. During the eye fixing, the driver focuses on a specific object of road environment. The time of driver’s eye fixing may vary from 0.1 to 2.5 seconds, depending on the complexity of the road traffic and the driver's functional state. The article presents an approach to determine the driver’s attention indicators at the evening twilight on city streets. The method of recording points of regard using Pupil Labs glasses was used to attention indicators deter-mination. Experimental studies of drivers' attention indicators in the evening twilight conditions were carried out in different types of city streets. The study involved drivers aged 20 to 52 years. During the driver eye fixing, the level of illumination at the evening twilight was recorded simultaneously. When the light changes from 50 lx or less, the driver feels visual fatigue from the continuous state of road objects exploration. At the same time, the number of fixations is significantly reduced, since the driver spends more time recognizing and searching of traffic elements, pedestrians, etc. Keywords: driver, twilight conditions, road traffic, attention.