Perceptual training to increase drivers’ ability to spot motorcycles at T-junctions

Abstract

Motorcyclists too often collide with other road users who pull out of side roads in front of them. These other road users typically report making all the necessary visual checks, despite failing to see the approaching motorcycle. These Look But Fail To See errors appear to be attenuated in road users who themselves have motorcycling experience, suggesting that motorcycle exposure may lower thresholds for spotting these vulnerable road users through natural perceptual learning. This raises the possibility that perceptual training could improve car drivers' abilities to spot motorcycles. Two experiments are reported. The first experiment demonstrated that a T-junction task, requiring participants to detect an approaching vehicle in briefly displayed images, was sensitive to participants' motorcycle experience, with dual drivers (who both ride motorcycles and drive cars) performing better than average car drivers. Following this, a second experiment split the car drivers into 2 groups. One group undertook a Pelmanism task requiring participants to match pairs of motorcycles, while the control group had to match pairs of fruit. When the two groups were retested on the T-junction task, the group who had undergone perceptual training for motorcycles via the Pelmanism task, were better able to identify approaching motorcycles, but not approaching cars. The results suggest that gamification of perceptual training for motorcycle detection provides a novel opportunity to improve driver safety.

Short-term cognitive conspicuity training does not improve driver detection of motorcycles at road junctions: A reply to Crundall, Howard, and Young (2017)

“…In particular, drivers performed poorly in recognising approaching motorcycles at far distances, compared to cars. This replicates several previous findings (Crundall et al, 2008b;Gershon et al, 2012;Cavallo & Pinto, 2012;Lee et al, 2015;Crundall et al, 2017). We report no effect of cognitive conspicuity training on drivers' accuracy scores in recognising the presence of an approaching motorcycle.…”

“…Following exposure to either the training or control stimuli, all participants took part in the testing procedure. In order to simulate driver glancing behaviour, we follow several others (Crundall et al, 2008b;Gershon, Ben-Asher & Shiner, 2012;Cavallo & Pinto, 2012;Lee, Sheppard & Crundall, 2015;Crundall et al, 2017) in asking participants to perform a naturalistic spontaneous and economical search of a road scene in our experimental task, as opposed to performing an artificial extended search task. As such, a trial began with the presentation of a fixation cross to the left of the screen for a duration varying randomly between 500-1,250 ms. A road scene image was then presented centrally for 250 ms, such that the participant needed to move their eyes to the right to check the road scene for the presence of an approaching vehicle.…”

“…discriminating between motorcycles) discrimination as opposed to the categorical level discrimination (discriminating between motorcycles and cars) used in the training task here. Because subordinate level processing should improve base-level detection (see Crundall et al, 2017), using such an approach may more robustly underpin perceptual learning. However, we note that perceptual training using a Pelmanism task did not elicit motorcycle detection advantages for trained compared to control groups (Crundall et al, 2017), and we propose that short-term visual training may not be sufficient for perceptual learning.…”

“…While it has been demonstrated that long-term exposure to motorcycles reduces a driver's propensity to crash into them (Magazzù et al, 2006;Brooks & Guppy, 1990) and increases their ability to detect them at junctions (Lee, Sheppard & Crundall, 2015;Crundall, Howard & Young, 2017; Experiment 1), it is less well known whether short-term perceptual training can similarly increase the cognitive conspicuity of motorcycles, resulting in greater detection by drivers. There is some evidence that perceptual training can increase expertise with a set of stimuli to the extent that they are processed in a fundamentally enhanced way (Gauthier & Tarr, 1997).…”

Motorcyclist Is the Right-of-Way Violator: A Population-Based Study of Motorcycle Right-of-Way Crash in Taiwan

“…Motorcyclists could therefore be a selfselected group of road users with greater road priority, leading to their unwillingness to yield ROW to oncoming vehicles. Such a phenomenon appears to be different in western countries where motorists do not expect to see motorcyclists: the detection failure was due to the fact that motorcycles are infrequently confronted in traffic [8,9]. According to the National Traffic Crash Dataset for the years 2003-2014, the ratio of the number of approach-turn motorcycle-turning crash to the number of approach-turn car-turning crash in Taiwan is 1:4.6, compared with 1:25 in the US [10] and 1:16 in the UK [11], respectively.…”