Effect of Driving Situation and Driving Experience on Eye Movements

Abstract

A previous investigation of the effects of familiarity with the driving situation on driver's eye movements assessed differences in eye movements between novice and expert drivers when driving in familiar and unfamiliar situations. The findings indicated that familiarity with the driving situation had a greater influence on expert drivers than on novice drivers. We assessed the validity of those results using number of saccades and gaze position. We found that the mean number of saccades elicited in the unfamiliar driving situation was significantly greater in the expert group than in the novice group. Thus, we confirmed the effects of familiarity with the situation and driving experience on driver's eye movements.

Comparing drivers’ visual attention at Junctions in Real and Simulated Environments

“…This finding suggests that drivers are aware of the potential danger associated with these three manoeuvre directions, as they adapt their visual search strategy in both the simulator and in the real world to account of this. This finding is consistent with the work of Hancock et al (1990) and Shinohara and Nishizaki (2017) who found that drivers' head movement frequency was higher in right turn, straight on and left turn manoeuvres respectively.…”

“…right turn, left turn or straight on manoeuvre, showed any differences in drivers' visual search strategies in the two driving environments. Previous research has investigated drivers' visual attention at junctions with differing manoeuvre demands (Hancock et al, 1990;Laya, 1992;Shinohara and Nishizaki, 2017), with results indicating that drivers display more head movements and shorter mean fixation durations during right turns compared to left and straight on manoeuvres. Given that right turns are seen in the majority of crashes at UK intersections (Clarke et al, 2007), and the current task also takes place with right-hand side oncoming traffic, these findings are intriguing, and therefore have the potential to be extended to investigate whether particular junction simulation tasks are more comparable to real world driving than others.…”