Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

etween learner drivers and experienced drivers. There are several possible
causes for this failure: (1) the task with the mouse clicks was too complex, (2)
the response method was disadvantageous for the group of older more,
experienced drivers, and (3) the interruptions (the pauses for clicking)
enabled the participants to discover latent hazards they had not noticed
before (McGowan & Banbury, 2004). These possible causes are elaborated
below:
1. Complexity
Participants could not only click on areas on the screen, but could also
indicate if they preferred to look to the left or to the right in order to
search for possible hazards. This is rather complex and not a natural
action in this context. Test instruction and familiarisation (with two
animation videos) was limited to four minutes and it is questionable if
all participants were equally well prepared to complete the task. The
animated video clips were made before the video clips that were used
in Chapter 4. Some of the latent hazards in the old video clips used in
the present study were rather ambiguous as the pauses were not always
at the right moment. The animated video clips were produced with a
software application that at that moment in time could not adequately
model car behaviour. Because of this, vehicles in the traffic scene not
always moved naturally. There was no dashboard visible at the bottom
of the screen. This could have made some participants believe they
were not the driver, but the driver of the lead vehicle in the video clip
as sometimes is the case in computer games. The computer monitor was
rather small (15") and the video clips were not presented full screen.
This all could have made it more difficult to detect latent hazards.
2. Disadvantageous for older participants
There were no computer illiterates in the groups. For the group of
novice drivers and experienced drivers in the present study use was
made of samples from another study (De Craen, 2010). Only
participants were recruited for that study that frequently used the
internet. Regular use of a computer however does not imply that all
participants played computer games. It could be that pointing and
clicking for regular computer gamers was performed at the procedural
stage of skill acquisition and for participants not familiar with computer
games at the declarative stage of skill acquisition (see Section 3.10). As
computer games are in particularly popular among young people, it
could be that the older, more experienced had a disadvantage.
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