Rapid Holistic Perception and Evasion of Road Hazards

How quickly can a driver perceive a critical hazard on or near the road? Evidence from vision research suggests that static scene perception is fast and holistic, but does this apply in dynamic road environments? Understanding how quickly drivers can perceive hazards in moving scenes is essential because it improves driver safety now, and will enable autonomous vehicles to work safely with drivers in the future. This paper describes a new, publicly available set of videos, the Road Hazard Stimuli, and a study assessing how quickly participants in the laboratory can detect and correctly respond to briefly presented hazards in them. We performed this laboratory experiment with a group of younger (20-25 years) and older (55-69 years) drivers, and found that while both groups only required brief views of the scene, older drivers required significantly longer to both detect (220 ms, younger; 403 ms, older) and correctly respond to hazards (388 ms younger; 605 ms older). Our results indicate that participants can perceive the scene and detect hazards holistically, without serially searching the scene, and can understand the scene and hazard sufficiently well to respond adequately with only slightly longer viewing durations.