01475852

Component

Allocating attention to surroundings is essential for maintaining situational awareness of the driving environment. However, shifting attention away from the front side inhibits perceptions of changes in traffic and roadway ahead. Thus, the key to safe driving is the adequate distribution of driver’s attention to forward and non-forward areas. Using the concept of renewal cycle and 100-car naturalistic glance data, this study investigates the duration of drivers allocating attention to focal points under varying conditions. The results showed that drivers who transit vision consecutively to 2 or more non-forward focal points were more likely to fixate away from forward area for more than 2.0 s, the safety threshold used in this research. Moreover, different driving tasks and environmental complexities substantially contributed to changes in fixation duration, particularly when drivers transit vision away to more than one non-forward focal point. The results suggest that analyzing the fixation duration can be effective in evaluating the impact of task complexity on safety. Finally, when considering the behavior of vision transition among focal points, current 2.5-s perception reaction time standard in some adverse driving conditions may not satisfy drivers’ performance of situational awareness. From the human factor perspective, driver attention allocation should be considered when designing roadway geometry and driver information systems.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AND10 Vehicle User Characteristics.

01470560

13-1007

English

18p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Attention; Drivers; Eye fixations; Highway safety; Reaction time; Visual perception

Attention allocation

Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I83: Accidents and the Human Factor

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-1007

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:18PM