The Use of Eye Movements to Evaluate the Effects of Driver Age on Risk Perception in an Advanced Driving Simulator

Younger, novice drivers (16 year olds with 6 months driving experience or less) continue to have the highest fatality rates. In the past, this was attributed to increased risk taking or undeveloped psychomotor skills necessary for driving. More recently, the high fatality rate has been attributed to the relative inability of younger, novice drivers to acquire and assess information relevant to the recognition of inherently risky situations. The current study seeks to determine whether this is the case by recording participants’ eye movements while they drove through a total of sixteen risky scenarios in an advanced driving simulator. Seventy-two participants (24 younger, novice drivers; 24 younger, experienced drivers; and 24 older, experienced drivers) were run. Some scenarios were designed so that an element of information vital to safe navigation of the situation was either obscured or occluded from the driver’s view during approach. Other scenarios required the driver to deduce a chain of events for appropriate navigation of the vehicle, where all elements contributing to the events were clearly visible. In either case, the participant’s point of gaze (recorded in real time) was assumed to indicate whether he or she had successfully acquired the appropriate information. It was hypothesized that the younger, novice drivers would recognize the risks least often and that the older, experienced drivers would recognize the risks most often. The results indicate significant age related differences in driver scanning behavior consistent with the hypotheses.