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Vision and Driving

Andrew Mackenzie, Julie Harris (funded by EPSRC DTG)

While there has been considerable research into driving skill, hazard perception and how it relates to accident involvement, these studies typically involve participants watching movies of driving situations and responding to developing hazards. Indeed the UK driving test now includes this approach for assessing hazard perception abilities. However, simply watching driving scenarios may not accurately measure hazard perception abilities for drivers. This project studies hazard perception in the context of an ecologically valid driving situation.

The aim of Andrew’s PhD is to examine the differences in spatiotemporal deployment of attention when actively driving and when passively viewing driving scenes. In addition I aim to investigate the differences in eye-movements across experience groups and ultimately aim, using eye-movement and other methods such as commentary driving, to investigate ways in which individuals can improve in hazard perception based tasks.