Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

the average score of in this case of even a group of professional drivers. Selfreported
experience with computer games had an effect on the scores.
Whereas there was no significant difference in the scores between learner
drivers and professional drivers, this difference got significant when the
scores were controlled for experience with computer games. As the
improved video task also failed to discriminate between learner drivers and
in this case even professional drivers, the conclusion has to be that mouse
clicks on latent hazards during pauses in video clips are not a good response
method to test hazard detection and recognition. Possible explanations for
this failure are the confounding effect of experience with computer games
and the confounding effect of the interruptions (the pauses).
7.5. Simulator-based hazard anticipation training
From the experiments discussed in Section 7.3 can be concluded that both
young novice drivers and older novice drivers fail to detect and recognize
latent hazards, because they do not know what to expect and accordingly do
not know where to look and that this deficiency is probably caused by lack of
experience. As poor hazard detection and recognition is presumably caused
by lack of experience, hazard detection and recognition is a skill that in
principle must be trainable. It is assumed that for the detection and
recognition of latent hazards elaborated schemata are required and that for
the quick and proper selection of the dominant schema in a particular road
and traffic situation, 'somatic markers' (Damasio, 1994) may help. When
situations resemble situations that have elicited emotions (e.g. fear) in the
past a tiny bit of this emotion, the somatic marker, is relived and this helps to
select the proper dominant schema without (much) conscious awareness. If
this is so, drivers have learned to detect and recognize latent hazards because
they have experienced near misses in which the latent hazard materialized
and they have felt emotions. In a simulator, drivers can experience crashes
without the negative physical consequence of a crash. However, mere
exposure to risky situations in a simulator probably is not enough to develop
hazard anticipation skills. Therefore, participants were challenged to detect
hazards and to improve themselves the way this is done in error training
(Ivancic & Hesketh, 2000). Use was also made of plan views to promote far
transfer. It was hypothesised that a simulator-based training in which
crashes or near crashes were elicited in combination with instruction, would
result in better scanning for latent hazards in situations that were similar to
the training scenarios, but different in appearance. These were the near
transfer situations. It was also hypothesised that the training would result in
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