Eye Movement Patterns for Novice Teen Drivers

Abstract

Attention to the road is essential to safe driving, but the development of appropriate eye glance scanning behaviors may require substantial driving experience. Novice teen drivers may focus almost exclusively on the road ahead rather than scanning the mirrors, and when performing secondary tasks, they may spend more time with eyes on the task than on the road. This paper examines the extent to which the scanning of novice teens improves with experience. For this study, 18 novice teen (younger than 17.5 years old) and 18 experienced adult drivers performed a set of in-vehicle tasks and a baseline driving segment on a test track, the teens within 4 weeks of licensure and then again 6 months later. This paper addresses the following questions: Did teen eye glance performance improve from initial assessment? Did teens and adults still differ after 6 months? Results for some tasks showed that rearview and left mirror-window (LM-W) glances improved for teens from initial testing to the 6-month follow-up and that some differences between teens and adults at initial testing were no longer significant at the 6-month follow-up, suggesting significant learning effects. The frequency of rearview and LM-W glances during secondary tasks improved among teens at the 6-month follow-up, but teens still had significantly fewer glances to mirrors than did adults when engaged in a secondary task.

Detection of Road Hazards by Novice Teen and Experienced Adult Drivers

“…However, most adults looked at the stop sign and displayed signs of indecision/late recognition. Previous research over the last 35 years and across several testing environments has consistently reported that adults scan more thoroughly and widely than novice teenagers (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17). Notably, in the present research, only half of the teens looked at the stop sign in this scenario.…”

“…The early research of Mourant and Rockwell (12,13,14,15) was the first to reveal differences between novices and experienced drivers in terms of the visual acquisition process (scanning forward and to the mirrors) and the frequency of lane-line sampling while driving on the open road. Additional efforts have recently begun using a test-track to evaluate differences between adult and novice drivers (16,17,18,19), during which differences were found in terms of stopping behavior (at an intersection) and scanning behavior. For example, adults have been found to be more likely to stop at a changing traffic light than youth, and teens tend to have fewer mirror glances than adults.…”

The effects of focused attention training on the duration of novice drivers' glances inside the vehicle

“…Olsen et al (2007) found that 6 months of driving experience for novice drivers did not decrease their Eyes Off Road time (EOR) while performing secondary tasks in a test track study. If six months of driving experience do not decrease the EOR time, one can assume that the metric used in this research (i.e., percentage of scenarios with maximum glance over a threshold) will not improve in six months either.…”

Analysis of factors affecting crash under risk scenarios based on driver homogenous clustering

“…However, it has been noted that observing road conditions can help drivers gain a comprehensive understanding of the surrounding traffic environment and is essential for safe driving [44,45]. The habit of observing road conditions must be developed through extensive driving experience, and novice teenage drivers may almost focus exclusively on the road ahead [46]. Older and more experienced drivers are observed in cluster 2.…”