Effects of lane-change scenarios on lane-change decision and eye movement

Improper lane-change manoeuvre can cause traffic safety issues and even lead to serious traffic collisions. Quantifying the decision behaviour and eye movements can provide a deeper understanding of lane-change manoeuvre in vehicle interaction environment. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of lane-change scenarios defined by gaps on lane-change decision and eye movements. Twenty-eight participants were recruited to complete a naturalistic driving experiment. Eye movements and lane-change decision duration (LDD) were recorded and analysed. Results suggested that the scanning frequency (SF) and saccade duration (SD) were the sensitive parameters to respond to lane-change scenarios. LDD was significantly affected by the scenario, SF, and SD. The increase in LDD was related to the high difficulty gap and high frequency scanning of multiple regions. These findings evaluated the driver's decision performance in response to different lane-change environments and provided valuable information for measuring the driver's scenario perception ability.Practitioner summary: A naturalistic driving experiment was conducted to evaluate the interaction of lane-change decision, eye movement, and lane changing gap in a lane-change task. The results reveal the sensitive eye movement parameters to lane-change scenario, which provide guidelines for driver's perception ability test and professional driver assessment.