| As the injury rate of children in traffic accidents increases year by year,the safety of children pedestrians has become a research hotspot in recent years.This study divided the cognitive process of street crossing of children into three stages: observation,hazard perception and decision-making stage,and summarized the factors affecting these three stages respectively.This study focuses on the hazard perception stage,especially the perception for behavioural prediction hazards and investigated how children interact with drivers.Under the theoretical framework of situation awareness,this paper discussed how children perceive,comprehend,and predict driver’s behavior.This study was composed of three studies,all of which adopted the classical experimental paradigm of hazard perception.In study 1,participants were asked to watch the video which showed vehicles approaching the zebra crossing,and then judge whether the scene was safe enough to cross the street.The change detection paradigm was also used to detect children’s perceiving of driver cues.The results show that the way children go to school and the experience of crossing the street alone significantly affected children’s judgment.The experience of crossing the street alone also affected children’s perceiving and the frequency of use of drivers’ cues when judging the safety of crossing the street.In addition,study 1 also found that the number of vehicles on the road affected the children’s safety judgments.In study 2,participants were asked to comprehend and predict the driver’s behavior by watching the video in which the driver’s behavior was clearly displayed.Moreover,5-point Likert scale was used to score the safety of crossing the street.In addition,in order to explore whether children’s comprehending and prediction of driver’s behavior are related to their development level of theory of mind,participants were also asked to complete two false belief tasks to evaluate their cognitive development level of first and second false beliefs.The results of study 2 showed that the type of driver distraction significantly affected children’s performance on the task.When the driver was visually distracted,the children could more accurately comprehend and predict the driver’s yield behavior,and had a lower crossing safety score,while when the driver was distracted by other behaviors without occupying the visual channel,the children’s response accuracy of comprehending and predicting driver’s behavior and judging the security were all reduced.In addition,children’s score of the second-order false belief task was correlated with their prediction score and crossing safety score,but children who passed the second-order false belief question showed worse driver behavior prediction performance.Study 3 adopted the same experimental paradigm as the Experiment 2,which explored how children predicted whether autonomous vehicle will yield and made the crossing decision when the driver’s cue lost efficacy.The results showed that the consistency of the autonomous vehicles cue and the driver cue significantly affected children’s performance.When the vehicle-driver cues were inconsistent,children could only judge and make decisions based on a single cue,which led to the more inaccurate prediction of whether autonomous vehicle will yield and more dangerous crossing decisions.In general,the results of this study indicate that children’s thinking patterns are self-centered and rule-centered,which makes it risky for children to comprehend and predict drivers’ yield behavior and to make safe crossing decisions.The value of experience is confirmed in this study,suggesting that training can be used in the future to promote children to learn how to use driver cues better and more rationally when crossing streets. |
