The Influencing Mechanism Of Driving Experience And Hazard Type On Drivers’ Hazard Perception

Hazard perception(HP),refers to the process of detecting,evaluating and responding to potential hazards on the road that have a high likelihood of leading to a collision.When facing a specific hazardous situation,drivers are expected to detect a potential hazard on time,and then they evaluate the hazardous level of the hazard and decide whether a response is needed to avoid a collision.However,the majority of studies concerning HP mainly focus on drivers’reaction time to hazards,little attention is paid to the characteristics of hazard detection and appraisal.Also,researches concerning the experience-related advantages on hazard detection and appraisal under different hazard types are limited.Therefore,this paper conducted four studies to investigate the influencing mechanism of driving experience and hazard type on different processes of HP.Study 1 aimed to develop a hazard perception test(HPT)using real driving stimuli.A one-factor design was employed with driving experience as the between-groups factor.67 video clips,shooting from drivers’ perspective,were shown to novice drivers(n=50)and experienced drivers(n=50).A 45-video HPT was got after eliminating the clips that can’t discriminate between novice and experienced drivers.The internal consistency coefficient(reliability)of the HPT was 0.937.The overall classification accuracy of the HPT was 81.3%.Study 2 aimed to examine the effects of driving experience and hazard type on drivers’HP reaction time and their eye movements.A 2×2x2 mixed design was employed with driving experience as the between-groups factor and hazard type and hazardous AOIs as the within-groups factors.The HPT was shown to novice(n=40)and experienced drivers(n=35).Results showed that novice drivers’HP reaction time on overt and covert hazards were slower than experienced drivers.Compared to experienced drivers,the inflexibility of novice drivers’visual strategies was the major factor that caused their slower reaction to hazards.On the one hand,novice drivers detected covert hazards slower and their first fixations were less efficient than experienced drivers.On the other hand,although novice drivers detected overt hazards faster than experienced drivers,they spent more time on hazard appraisal.This indicated that novice drivers can’t translate the information acquired from the environment into behavioral requirements;at least the efficiency of this translation was worse than experienced drivers.Study 3 aimed to examine the effects of driving experience and hazard type on hazard detection.A 2×2 mixed design was employed with driving experience as the between-groups factor and hazard type as the within-groups factor.In this study,novice(n=40)and experienced drivers(n=35)saw the HPT for a second time but in this case they were adapted to a signal detection task-a yes/no task.Results showed that novice drivers’ criteria on overt and covert hazards were more conservative than experienced drivers.The experience-related difference of sensitivity can only be found on covert hazards.Study 4 aimed to examine the effects of driving experience and hazard type on hazard appraisal.The experiment design was the same with Study 3.In this study,novice(n=40)and experienced drivers(n=35)saw the HPT for a third time but in this time they only needed to observe the video clips and then rate the hazardous level of each hazard.Results showed that experienced drivers rated the hazardous level of overt and covert hazards higher than novice drivers.Furthermore,novice drivers rated the hazardous level of overt hazards higher than covert hazards,though the difference wasn’t significant.However,the result of experienced drivers was opposite and the difference of their rating was significant.The conclusions are as follows:1.The reliability and validity of the HPT was acceptable,and it can be used as a highly useful and valid tool to measure Chinese drivers’ hazard perception ability.2.The overall processing efficiency of experienced drivers was better than novice drivers.The experience-related differences of HP reaction time were due to the differences in both hazard detection phase and hazard appraisal phase.Drivers’ eye movements can reflect their differences of HP reaction time and response accuracy.3.Experienced drivers’ hazard detection ability was better than novice drivers.The differences of sensitivity(only for overt hazards)and criterion on covert and overt hazards accounted for the experience-related difference of hazard detection of the two driver groups.4.Experienced drivers’ hazard appraisal ability was better than novice drivers.Drivers’hazard appraisal ability can not only be influenced by hazard type,but also influenced by their self-assessed driving skill.