Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

two of the six test scenarios and only when the simulator had a wide field of
view. There was not one significant effect when the training simulator had a
narrow field of view. In the two test scenarios some effect was found were
near transfer scenarios. A possible explanation for the rather poor results is
the fact that the didactical opportunities that simulators offer were not fully
utilized in this training program. In case of a crash participants only had to
drive through the same scenario again.
A fourth simulator-based training program that among others was aimed to
enhance the higher order skills of novice drivers such as hazard perception,
situation awareness and decision making under time pressure, is the Driver
Assessment and Training System (DATS) (Allen et al., 2003; Allen, Park, &
Cook, 2008; Allen et al., 2007; Allen et al., 2002). In the part of this training
program that addresses the mentioned higher order skills, students drive in
scenarios that contain critical events. These events are situations in which
various types of collisions are elicited, such as pedestrians that walked out or
cars on a collision course at intersections. All hazards are imminent hazards.
The other road users that create the critical situations are automatically
triggered by the driving behaviour of the student. If for instance a student
drives fast, the pedestrian that start to cross the road also walks fast. During
each drive, performance indicators such as speed, time to collision, and
traffic signal violations are automatically recorded. Only when the scoring
meets a certain criterion the students can graduate to the next training
scenario. If the criterion is not met, students have to drive through additional
scenarios. The crash data (recorded by the police) of three large groups of
students that did DATS during their initial driver training were compared
over a two year period after licensing. The first group did DATS on a
desktop simulator with one monitor (narrow field of view), the second group
did DATS on a desktop simulator with three monitors (wide field of view)
and the third group did DATS in a vehicle cab simulator with a wide field of
view. The development over time of the cumulative crash rate of the single
monitor group was about the same as that of a control group that did not do
DATS. The cumulative crash rate of the group that did DATS on the 3
monitor desktop configuration was at all times somewhat lower than the
cumulative crash rate of the single monitor group and the cumulative crash
rate of the group that did DATS in the wide screen vehicle cab configuration
was considerably lower at all times than that of the single monitor group.
However, these results have to be interpreted with caution. There was no
random assignment of the participants to the various groups. The
participants in the one and three monitor desktop groups were high school
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