Identifying objective behavioural measures of expert driver situation awareness

Area of Science:

• Human Factors
• Cognitive Psychology
• Traffic Safety

Background:

• Reducing road crash rates necessitates understanding driver risk factors and expertise development.
• Driver situation awareness (SA) is crucial for safe driving performance and expertise.
• Operationalizing SA assessment is vital for understanding its role in driving expertise.

Purpose of the Study:

• To adapt the Perceptual Cycle Model (PCM) for assessing SA in the driving context.
• To correlate verbalizations indicative of SA with objective gaze metrics in drivers.
• To differentiate between expert and experienced drivers based on SA and gaze patterns.

Main Methods:

• Adapted the Perceptual Cycle Model (PCM) for post hoc analysis of driving incidents.
• Collected coded verbalizations and objective gaze metrics from expert and experienced drivers.
• Analyzed verbal counts and gaze data to assess situation awareness (SA).

Main Results:

• Verbalizations and gaze metrics differentiated between expert and experienced drivers.
• No significant correlation was found between verbal SA indicators and gaze metrics.
• Expert and experienced drivers showed differences in updating their driving task schema, despite similar effort.

Conclusions:

• The adapted PCM provides a domain-specific assessment that reliably differentiates driver expertise levels.
• While specific gaze metrics were poor predictors of SA, gaze content revealed key differences.
• Understanding expert SA development contributes to strategies for reducing road crash risk.