Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

latent hazard. There were three versions of each scenario. First, they drove
the scenario in which as in the video clips the latent hazard did not
materialize. After this short drive, trainees were asked what could have
happened that did not happen. Hereafter, irrespective of their answer they
drove the so-called error drive. This error drive was the same drive as the
first drive, but now with the latent hazard materializing aggressively. If the
latent hazard was not detected and recognized, this drive ended in a crash or
a near miss. After this, a plan view of the traffic situation appeared on the
centre screen of the simulator. Trainees had to explain to themselves on the
basis of this plan view why the near miss or crash had happened and what
they could have done to avert the crash or near miss. Trainees also received
instruction about how to scan and anticipate the latent hazard. Finally,
trainees drove the scenario for the third time. In this third version, the latent
hazard also materialized, but less aggressively than in the error drive. This
third drive was intended to offer trainees the opportunity to practice what
they had learned. After this third drive, the cycle started all over again with a
different latent hazard in a different scenario.
In order to test if the training had improved visual search for latent
hazards, eighteen trained and eighteen untrained young novice drivers that
were around 19 years of age and had around two years driving experience,
were evaluated on an advanced driving simulator. Participants drove
through three scenarios that all together contained seven situations with
latent hazards that did not materialize that were the same as the latent
hazards in the training, but that were different in appearance. These were the
near transfer situations. The three drives contained twelve situations with
latent hazards that did not materialize that were conceptually different from
the latent hazards in the training. These were the far transfer situations. The
eye movements of participants were recorded while they drove. The trained
group showed anticipatory gaze directions in 84% of the near transfer latent
hazard situations and the untrained group showed correct gaze directions in
57% of these situations. The trained group showed anticipatory gaze
directions in 71% of the far transfer latent hazard situations and the
untrained group showed anticipatory gaze directions in 53% of these
situations. The differences between the groups in both the near transfer
situations and the far transfer situations were significant, but the effect size
was smaller in the far transfer situations. However, as far as the effect of the
simulator-based training program could be compared with a PC-based
training program that used the same latent hazards for training, the
simulator-based training was not better than the PC-based training. Selfrating
of driver confidence was not higher after the training for the trained
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