Effects of Inaccurate Gaze Behavior on Young Drivers’ Hazard Anticipation

A previous study (Yamani et al., 2018) demonstrated that the administration of expert eye movement videos following hazard anticipation training can improve the proportion of latent hazards anticipated by young drivers compared to control conditions. The current driving simulator study sought to examine whether the improvements observed in the previous study were merely due to drivers’ exposure to videos of the simulated driving scenarios with expert eye movement overlays immediately prior to evaluation, or whether modeling the accuracy of eye movement behavior can lead participants to internalize hazard anticipation skills more effectively. In a between-subject design, 36 drivers (18-21 years) were assigned to one of three experimental conditions – training only, training plus expert eye movements or training plus novice eye movements. All participants navigated four unique driving scenarios, each with their eye movements tracked and recorded. Analyses of the eye movement data showed that young drivers who saw the expert eye movement (accurate) videos immediately following training anticipated a substantially greater proportion of latent hazards compared to the young drivers that saw novice eye movement (inaccurate) videos following training. The data provide some evidence that drivers were able to successfully map and incorporate correct hazard anticipation glance behavior into their mental models. The findings present some implications for the design and evaluation of eye movement-based training interventions