Children's visual attention in street-crossing tasks: insights from virtual reality and eye tracking

Area of Science:

• Pedestrian safety research
• Child development studies
• Human-computer interaction

Background:

• Children's street-crossing is a critical safety concern.
• Understanding visual attention is key to improving pedestrian safety.
• Virtual reality (VR) offers a controlled environment for studying child behaviour.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate visual attention patterns in children during street-crossing.
• To examine age and gender differences in visual attention to vehicles.
• To determine the relationship between visual attention and safe crossing behaviour.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a virtual reality (VR) environment with integrated eye-tracking.
• 377 children aged 7-10 participated in six VR street-crossing trials.
• Linear regression analysis was used to analyze gaze behaviour data.

Main Results:

• Older children demonstrated increased proportional visual attention to vehicles, suggesting developmental improvements.
• Boys spent less total time visually attending to vehicles compared to girls.
• Higher visual attention to vehicles correlated with fewer dangerous street crossings.

Conclusions:

• Visual attention to traffic-relevant elements is crucial for children's pedestrian safety.
• Developmental and gender-based differences in visual attention strategies were observed.
• VR with eye-tracking is an effective tool for studying children's road safety behaviour.