Empirical Evaluation of Hazard Anticipation Behaviors in the Field and on Driving Simulator Using Eye Tracker

Eye behaviors have been used with driving simulators to evaluate the effectiveness of novice and older driver training programs. Driving simulators are often favored when drivers must be placed in risky situations. Because there was no study of whether eye behaviors observed on a driving simulator in risky scenarios were also observed in the field, the authors had both trained and untrained novice drivers maneuver a controlled set of 10 scenarios on a driving simulator. The scenarios were similar to a set of scenarios that a different, matched set of trained and untrained drivers had navigated in the field. Drivers in this simulator study were trained with the same PC program used by drivers in the field study. Five of the scenarios that the trained drivers saw on the simulator and in the field were similar to those seen in training on a PC (near transfer); the other five were similar in concept to those in training but different in surface features (far transfer). A fixation on the region of a scenario that had information relevant to identifying a risk was scored as recognizing the risk. On the simulator, trained drivers recognized the risk 41.7% more often than untrained drivers in the near-transfer scenarios and 32.6% more often in the far-transfer scenarios. In the field, trained drivers recognized the risk 38.8% more often in the near-transfer and 20.1% more often in the far-transfer scenarios. Both effects were highly significant, and the difference between them was not close to significant. Thus results from tests on a simulator have a close correspondence with those in the field.