Pedestrians Accept Shorter Distances to Light Vehicles Than Dark Ones When Crossing the Street

Abstract

Does the brightness of an approaching vehicle affect a pedestrian’s crossing decision? Thirty participants indicated their street-crossing intentions when facing approaching light or dark vehicles. The experiment was conducted in a real daylight environment and, additionally, in a corresponding virtual one. A real road with actual cars provides high face validity, while a virtual environment ensures the scenario’s precise reproducibility and repeatability for each participant. In both settings, participants judged dark vehicles to be a more imminent threat—either closer or moving faster—when compared with light ones. Secondary results showed that participants accepted a significantly shorter time-to-contact when crossing the street in the virtual setting than on the real road.

The effect of contrast on pedestrians’ perception of vehicle speed in different road environments

“…The increase of the perceived time-to-arrival supposedly results from a reduction in the perceived speed or, alternatively in the latter case, an increase of the perceived distance. Consistent with these results, pedestrians have been found to accept smaller safety gaps in front of vehicles painted with lighter compared to darker colors (Feldstein & Peli, 2020). As lighter vehicles presented a lower contrast against the well-lit background, this behavior has been attributed to contrast-induced changes in the perceived vehicle kinematics.…”

Reliability of the triangle completion test in the real-world and in virtual reality

“…In a distance estimation task found no significant differences in estimates of distance in their VR setup compared to the real-world. However, once a motion component was added, judging road crossing safety with a vehicle bearing down on them, different factors influenced people's spatial cognitive perception in VR compared to the real-world (Feldstein and Dyszak, 2020;Feldstein and Peli, 2020). While people demonstrated consistent responses to car color in both scenarios (Feldstein and Peli, 2020), they responded differently to car velocity in the different environments (Feldstein and Dyszak, 2020).…”

“…However, once a motion component was added, judging road crossing safety with a vehicle bearing down on them, different factors influenced people's spatial cognitive perception in VR compared to the real-world (Feldstein and Dyszak, 2020;Feldstein and Peli, 2020). While people demonstrated consistent responses to car color in both scenarios (Feldstein and Peli, 2020), they responded differently to car velocity in the different environments (Feldstein and Dyszak, 2020). These discrepancies do not preclude the transfer of testing into a virtual world, nevertheless, the different mediums are likely to affect performance, and therefore, the ecological validity of the virtual assessment.…”

Effects of visual blur and contrast on spatial and temporal precision in manual interception

“…In Experiment 2, no effects of reduced contrast where found, indicating that the results of blur were not due to changes in contrast which is in line with a study on time to contact estimations that found no effect of contrast, or luminance levels (Landwehr et al 2013). Yet, a vast amount of studies showing altered velocity perception for moving stimuli with low contrast levels would predict effects on temporal accuracy (Feldstein and Peli 2020;Thompson 1982;Thompson et al 2006). For instance, Battaglini et al (2013) found a main effect of contrast levels on speed perception.…”