Abstract
Traffic crash statistics have shown that novice drivers have more risks than those of experienced drivers, in which novice drivers may suffer from lower efficiency in attentional resource allocation when driving. Since eye movements are closely related to attentional resource allocation, the current study investigated effects of road situations and driving behaviors on driver’s attention by measuring eye movements in both experienced and novice drivers.
Subjects freely viewed traffic videos of three road situations (highway, suburb, and city road) with two driving behaviors (straight driving and lane changing), respectively. The subjects were required to imagine themselves as drivers while viewing videos and their eye movements were recorded. We found significant interaction between subject group, road condition and driving behaviors on fixation duration. The experienced drivers fixated longer than the novice drivers while viewing highway and suburb videos with straight driving and this discrepancy increased when comparing lane changing to straight driving. In addition, both groups of drivers did not differ in the city road within both driving behaviors. We also found significant interaction between subject group and driving behaviors on saccade amplitude. The experienced drivers showed saccades of smaller amplitudes than the novice drivers with both driving behaviors and the difference between subject groups enlarged in lane changing.
These results show that different parameters of eye movements are affected variously by road and driving conditions differently for experienced and novice drivers, suggesting differential strategy of allocating attentional resource between both groups. These imply that the risks of novice drivers in driving may be reduced through attention training to achieve the mode of eye movements of experienced drivers.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013