Abstract
To avoid collisions, pedestrians depend on their ability to perceive and interpret the visual motion of other road users. Eye movements influence motion perception, yet pedestrians’ gaze behavior has been little investigated. In the present study, we ask whether observers sample visual information differently when making two types of judgements based on the same virtual road-crossing scenario and to which extent spontaneous gaze behavior affects those judgements. Participants performed in succession a speed and a time-to-arrival two-interval discrimination task on the same simple traffic scenario—a car approaching at a constant speed (varying from 10 to 90 km/h) on a single-lane road. On average, observers were able to discriminate vehicle speeds of around 18 km/h and times-to-arrival of 0.7 s. In both tasks, observers placed their gaze closely towards the center of the vehicle’s front plane while pursuing the vehicle. Other areas of the visual scene were sampled infrequently. No differences were found in the average gaze behavior between the two tasks and a pattern classifier (Support Vector Machine), trained on trial-level gaze patterns, failed to reliably classify the task from the spontaneous eye movements it elicited. Saccadic gaze behavior could predict time-to-arrival discrimination performance, demonstrating the relevance of gaze behavior for perceptual sensitivity in road-crossing.
Highlights
To avoid collisions, pedestrians depend on their ability to perceive and interpret the visual motion of other road users
We secondly explore to which extent eye movements are predictive of the discrimination task by training and testing a classification algorithm to discriminate the tasks based on gaze patterns
We explored how participants took these parameters into account by performing logistic regressions entering vehicle speed, time-to-arrival as well as start and end position as variables for predicting each participant’s “faster” and “earlier” responses
Summary
Pedestrians depend on their ability to perceive and interpret the visual motion of other road users. The aforementioned findings may be relevant in natural tasks including navigation in traffic They suggest that an unfavorable visual sampling strategy can affect road user safety by introducing perceptual biases and promoting risky crossing decisions based on inaccurate motion estimates, little research has yet explicitly. The authors suggest that different visual sampling strategies used by observers when estimating vehicle speed may be partly responsible for perceptual biases such as the size-speed illusion, i.e., larger vehicles appear slower in their approach[18]. This conclusion is interesting with regards to the effect of size depending on the type of estimate being performed. If the perceptual bias on the perceived speed originates in gaze behavior, this may imply that spontaneous gaze behavior differs between the two judgements
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