Summary: High accident risk of novice and inexperienced drivers is associated with their poor hazard perception ability. In past studies, hazard perception latencies (reaction time) were measured using hazards in simulated traffic environments, scenario-based video clips, or photographs, but rarely with real-life traffic situations. We developed two different measures to assess hazard perception ability (1) video clips of hazards recorded in real-life traffic settings and (2) the video clips of animated hazards. We compared these two measures in terms of their power in discriminating between novice and experienced drivers. Novice (N= 43) and experienced drivers (N = 65) were admisistered computerbased Turkish Hazard Perception Tests consisting of 40 real traffic and animated video clips of hazards. Results revealed that although experienced drivers detected the hazards relatively earlier than the novices on average, the difference between the groups was not statistically significant for both real-traffic and video clips. Examination of the group differences on each item suggested video clips reflecting actual traffic situations discriminate novice and experienced drivers better than animated clips. Content analyses of the clips that significantly discriminated groups revealed that novice drivers have difficulty in detecting hazards resulting from an unexpected or suddent violation of road users. It seemed that lack of experience in anticipating the other road users' violations creates a critical vulnerability for the safety of novice drivers.

Summary:Hazard perception (HP) ability of novice drivers has been studied mainly by using computer-based implicit measures, such as simulators or video clips. In this study, we tried to replicate and extend Farrand and McKenna's (2001) study that compared computer-based HP testing with self-assessment. We measured HP latencies of experienced and novice drivers by using video clips reflecting actual traffic scenes and their domain-specific self-assessment. Participants (43 novice and 65 experienced drivers) were administered the computer-based Turkish Hazard Perception Test and a brief self-reported HP scale. Results indicated that experienced drivers had significantly shorter reaction time than novice drivers on computer-based video clips with a small effect size, but they reported much better HP skill on paper and pencil test with a strong effect size. Although the computer-based test scores were not correlated with selfreported HP for the novice driver group, they were negatively and significantly correlated for the experienced driver group, suggesting that experienced drivers develop a stronger overconfidence effect in their driving and hazard perception skills than novices.