Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

(no difference between young novice drivers and older, more experienced
drivers) and young novice drivers and older more experienced drivers
differed in skin conductance when exposed to photographs with latent
hazards. Skin conductance response is commonly used as a measure for
emotional arousal. The motivational aspect is not measured this way. This
could be done by asking participants what they would do in the depicted
traffic situations on the photographs. Would they for instance reduce speed
in situations with latent hazards?
4.1.5. Eye movements, fixations and attention
When driving, drivers look at various elements in the traffic scene. The rapid
movements the eyes make from one gaze direction to the other are called
saccades. Normally two to three saccades are made per second. The time in
between two saccades that the gaze is directed on one point in the scene is
called a fixation. How long a fixation at a certain object or situation must be
in order to identify it, is not exactly known and depends on the situation.
Under normal conditions, the duration of a fixation represents the amount of
time it takes to identify the object plus the time it takes to program the next
saccade. In these normal conditions the minimum duration for fixations to
identify a special aspect it is about 200 ms (e.g. Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982). A
fixation duration of about 200 ms is according to Velichkovsky et al. (2002)
also the minimum duration required for focal vision and the detection and
recognition of hazards in traffic. According Velichkovsky et al. (2002), shorter
fixations are pre-attentive and are in the realm of the ambient visual system
that is involved in spatial orientation of the driver. Do the saccades and
fixations of drivers tell us something about their skills to anticipate hazards?
The 'eye-mind assumption' is attractive, but are there indications that there is
a relationship between eye movements, attention and what people think?
When participants that were situated in an fMRI scanner were asked to pay
attention to a certain area in a scene without directing their eyes (fixating) to
that area the same regional networks in the parietal, frontal and temporal
lobes got activated as when participants were requested to fixate on that area
(Corbetta et al., 1998). This is a strong indication that there is a relationship
between attention and fixation. Note that this experiment also demonstrates
that attention can be paid to a particular area in a scene before a fixation to
this area is made. Irwin (2004) presents an overview of studies from which
can be inferred that except for reflexes, attention precedes fixations. One
obvious reason why persons scan the environment is that the area of high
visual acuity in the centre which is called the fovea, is very small (Rayner &
Pollatsek, 1992). At 5° angle from the centre, the visual acuity is already half
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