Control and Monitoring during Lane Changes

This work examines the visual scanning behavior of drivers in preparing and executing a lane change. In an experiment, drivers navigated a naturalistic highway environment with moderate traffic in a fixed-base driving simulator. The data collected in the experiment included steering control data, eye movements, and verbal protocols. Drivers began to exhibit significantly different scanning behavior approximately three seconds before initiation of the lane change, showing increasingly more frequent gazes at the rear-view mirror at the expense of gazes to their current lane. As soon as they decided to make a lane change (as indicated in their verbal protocols), drivers shifted their gaze from salient guiding features of the current lane (e.g., tangent point or lead vehicle) to salient guiding features of the destination lane. In addition, drivers exhibited increased gazes at surrounding vehicles (front and back) before and during lane changes for the purposes of situation awareness and decision making. The results support a dual-purpose view of driver gazes for control and monitoring.