Visual Attention and Driving: How to Measure it and How to Train it

We present two pieces of research in the area of visual behaviour and driving. Our first study investigated if there are differences in eye movement behaviour when viewing movies of driving passively, as if one were a passenger, and driving where one controls the action via steering. One group of participants was asked to complete a passive hazard perception task where they had to watch videos of driving situations and press a button when they spotted a hazard, and another group were asked to drive in a simulated environment and press a button when they spotted the hazard. Eye movements were recorded throughout. We found that individuals attended to more of the roadway both horizontal and vertically and were faster at fixating the hazards in the passive task than the active task. We suggest that these results may imply that standard passive tests have limited utility when developing visual models of driving behaviour. Our second study investigated whether we can use expert eye movement information to train more efficient looking patterns when driving. Two groups of inexperienced drivers undertook two simulated drives one week apart whilst eye movements were tracked. One group was asked to watch pre-recorded videos of eye movements of an expert driver before the second driving session. The other group (control) was not shown the eye movement videos. We found that, after watching the videos, drivers exhibited increased horizontal visual scanning of the road and an increase of fixations towards the interior mirror and driver-side mirror. The control group showed no such improvement in visual behaviour. The results show that eye movement cueing can be used to train more efficient search strategies in a dynamic task such as driving and may highlight a possible training intervention method which can be introduced to educate early stage drivers.