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Background: Driving in urban traffic requires ad-vanced cognitive skills: perceiving all relevant traffic participants,anticipating their likely trajectories, deciding which action totake, and controlling the vehicle. The underlying perceptual andcognitive processes are subject to occasional failures, which candepend in a complex way on learned heu...
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... prerequisite for a valid judgment of participant's perception of the degree of realism the experiment posed is their experience in driving a car in urban areas. Figure 4 shows descriptive statistics on the distribution of driving frequency in urban traffic. Evidently, the vast majority drives at least often in urban traffic, and no one is entirely lacking in urban driving experience. ...
Citations
... Possible reasons for the large occurrence of accidents in this situation are that either the motorist fails to discover the cyclist, or the motorist is not sufficiently aware of the fact that cyclists may cross and must be granted the right of way. However, the exact reasons for collisions in this situation are still under investigation [8]. Scientific research can contribute to investigating both the causes of accidents and the effectiveness of proposed countermeasures, such as driver assistance or awareness systems. ...
... 1) Test track study (see [8]): The study was conducted on a test track with participants driving a conventional car. ...
Crashes involving vulnerable road users (VRUs) account for nearly 70% of all traffic fatalities in urban areas. To evaluate the effectiveness of measures to improve VRU safety, the causes of accidents attributable to human behavior require investigation, which remains a challenge to date. Experiments for this purpose are often conducted in a controlled environment, such as on test tracks or in driving simulators. In this work, we compared gaze behavior and subjective realism between a test track and two different driving simulators, one using a head-mounted display (HMD-Sim) and one using an LED wall and a full vehicle mockup (LED-Sim). Both on the test track and in the simulator a right turn maneuver was studied in which a motorist turns right and a cyclist goes straight ahead through an intersection. The relevant areas of interest (gaze data) and subjective questionnaires were matched. Results show that shoulder glances were observed significantly more often in the test track experiment, whereas mirror glances occurred more often in the simulators. No difference was observed with respect to the perceived responsibility for safeguarding behavior across the different environments. The simulator study was subjectively perceived more similar to real traffic than the test track based on questionnaire data. The findings presented may facilitate the selection of an appropriate test environment for particular research questions. However, given the differences in the two study designs, further research is needed to make more informed conclusions about the applicability of test track and simulator experiments.
The absence of physical accident risk in driving simulation, which allows for safely studying critical driving situations, also reduces the driver’s risk perception, which may result in unrealistic
driver behavior. Validation studies in this context are rare for ethical reasons, making it difficult to assess the extent of this issue at present. The present study addresses this gap by utilizing
naturalistic driving data. Four critical cut-in situations on German highways were extracted from naturalistic data and replicated in a driving simulator study with N = 58 participants. Both in-situ self-ratings on subjective criticality and post-hoc video-based ratings (from the driver and objective observers), as well as presence ratings, were collected to supplement driver behavior.
Although driver reactions in the simulator and the field were not equivalent in absolute terms, drivers in both the simulation and the real world exhibited accident-avoidance behavior through
braking reactions, indicating relative validity. No clear mediating role of the sense of presence towards a more careful driver behavior was found. This work shows that drivers exhibit accident-avoiding behavior in the simulator and tend to react to hazards in the simulator similarly as they would in a real situation, while absolute numerical values should only be interpreted with caution.
