The Use of Eye Movements to Evaluate the Effects of Driver Age on Risk Perception in an Advanced Driving Simulator

Overview

• Introduction
• Experiment
• Results
• Conclusions

Introduction

• High Fatality Rates
  • Younger, Novice Drivers (16 yr old with 6 months or less driving experience)

    
    Driver Fatality Rates by Age and Sex, 1996

• Frequent Explanation
  • Younger, novice drivers are not as emotionally mature as their older counterparts ??
• Recent Studies
  • Teenage Drivers’ abilities to acquire and assess information relevant to recognition of risks in road.
• This Study
  • Comparison of scanning behavior and eye fixations of younger, novice drivers with more experienced drivers.

Experiment

• Pedestrian Crosswalk

  
  Pedestrian Crosswalk (click image to start video (4.21 MB))

• Additional scenarios can be found at www.ecs.umass.edu/hpl, Young Drivers Link
• Scenarios
  • Each subject drove four blocks
  • Four risky scenarios per block
  • Task was to follow a lead vehicle in all the drives
• Materials
  • Advanced Fixed Base Driving Simulator

    
    HPL Driving Simulator

  • ASL Series 5000 Head Mounted Eye-Tracker

    
    ASL Series 5000 Head Mounted Eye-Tracker

• Subjects
  • 24 younger, novice Drivers in their first 6 months of driving experience (M=16.3, SD=0.4)
  • 24 younger, experienced drivers, 19-25 years old (M=21.3, SD=2.2)
  • 24 older, experienced drivers, 60-75 years old (M=66.9, SD=6.4)
• Pedestrian Crosswalk – Eye Movements

  
  Pedestrian Crosswalk – Eye Movements (Note: the video was taken by the field camera below the visor of the eye tracker and therefor is a mirror image, click image to start video (4.28 MB))

Results

• Example scenarios and results:
  • Truck Left Turn

    
    Truck Left Turn (click image to start video (2.93 MB))

    
    Truck Left Turn - Percentage of drivers recognizing risks

  • Truck parked in front of crosswalk

    
    Truck parked in front of crosswalk (click image to start video (4.21 MB))

    
    Truck parked in front of crosswalk - Percentage of drivers recognizing risks

  • Intersection with hidden sidewalk

    
    Intersection with hidden sidewalk (click image to start video (4.16 MB))

    
    Intersection with hidden sidewalk - Percentage of drivers recognizing risks

• Overall

  
  Overall - Percentage of drivers recognizing risks

Conclusions

• Across scenarios, younger novice drivers are less likely to attend to risk relevant areas.
• Implications for younger drivers training.
• Older drivers between 60 and 75 are much more likely to attend to those areas than either of the younger groups.
• Older drivers predict specific areas of high risk in a scenario.