Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

hazards, drivers have to imagine a possible other road user they cannot see
(yet). In order to anticipate overt latent hazards, drivers have to be aware of
the fact that visible other road users in the given circumstances could start
acting dangerously. It is probably more difficult to imagine another road
user who is not visible than to predict a dangerous action committed by a
visible other road user. There are indeed indications that young novice
drivers have more problems anticipating covert latent hazards than overt
latent hazards (Borowsky, Oron-Gilad , & Parmet, 2009; Pradhan et al., 2005;
Sagberg & Bjørnskau, 2006), but to date, the difference between covert latent
hazards and overt latent hazards has not been systematically analysed. In
this thesis, an explicit distinction is made between covert latent hazards and
overt latent hazards. The third expectation is that:
• Novice drivers (both young novice drivers and older novice drivers)
have more problems anticipating covert latent hazards than overt latent
hazards.
The objective of the study presented in this chapter was to test the mentioned
three hypotheses. In order to test the hypotheses among others, eye
movements and the durations of eye fixations were recorded with an eye
tracker. The (theoretical) relationship between hazard anticipation and eye
movements is discussed in the Sections 4.1.5, 4.1.6 and 4.1.7 of this
introduction. Before these sections on eye movements and hazard
anticipation, the literature on the relationship between hazard anticipation
and crash rate is reviewed in Section 4.1.2. In Section 4.1.3, a review of
methods used to test hazard anticipation and the differences found with
these methods between novice drivers and experienced drivers is presented.
What the most suitable types of test are to test the hypotheses, is discussed in
Section 4.1.4. In the last section of this introduction (Section 4.1.8), the test
methods that were applied are mentioned and the detailed hypotheses are
presented.
4.1.2. Scores on hazard perception tasks and crash rate
In several studies an association has been found between crash rate and
performance on what is mostly called a hazard perception task (Congdon,
1999; Darby, Murray, & Raeside, 2009; McKenna & Horswill, 1999; Pelz &
Krupat, 1974; Quimby et al., 1986; Wells et al., 2008). The better the scores on
the hazard perception tests were, the lower the crash rate was. There are
however exceptions. In the method that is used most often to measure
hazard perception, participants watch video clips taken from a driver's
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