Unravelling situational awareness of multi-tasking pedestrians through average gaze fixation durations: An...

Pedestrians use visual cues (i.e., gaze) to communicate with the other road users, and visual attention towards the surrounding environment is essential to be situationally aware and avoid oncoming conflicts. However, multi-tasking activities compromise visual attention behaviour. Average Fixation Duration (AFD) was captured in six Areas of Interest (AOI) when engaged in activities like texting, talking, listening to music (LM) and gazing at billboards (GBB) while crossing the road. Quantification of situational awareness is accomplished using Weibull Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model with AFD as a duration variable. This approach helps to understand ongoing cognitive attention required for the user to process the information conveyed by the AOI. The survival rate obtained from Weibull AFT model is defined as the probability of continuing gaze fixation on an AOI at a given time instance. The study demonstrated thatthe continuation of gaze fixation increased greatly when texting compared to other multi-tasking activities, which was attributed to a decrease in situational awareness. Talking, LM and GBB-involved pedestrians shifted their gaze to another AOI within a maximum of 300 ms, except for vehicle AOI. The LM activity, perceived as less task-intensive and less risky, compensated for their gaze fixation behaviour by spending less time on different AOIs. In addition, billboards near pedestrian crossing locations impact gaze fixation behaviour similar to talking on the phone. The study suggested mitigative policies and strategies to curb distracted walking. Additionally, the aim is to design human-computer interaction-based incident warning systems for real-world situations using augmented reality glasses.