Do Car Drivers Respond Earlier to Close Lateral Motion Than to Looming?

Paper in proceeding, 2022

It is essential to understand drivers’ responses to visual stimuli when analyzing or reconstructing driver behavior in critical traffic situations. In a controlled experiment, drivers’ on-road glances relevant to a situation may however be obscured by the presence of check glances which are not induced by the visual input that the experiment intends to study. The purpose of this work is to compare five methods to reduce the influence check glances may have on the results in studies of drivers’ glance responses. We apply the methods to a comparison of driver glance response times in a critical lead vehicle brake event (characterized by strong looming) and a non-critical close cut-in event (characterized by a distinct lateral motion), using data from a previously conducted driving simulator experiment. Without the noise added to the analysis from the check glances, our study shows that drivers look back towards the road in front earlier when exposed to close lateral motion, than when exposed to looming. We conclude that a careful data selection process aiming to minimize the influence of potential check glances is important to ensure relevance of the results in glance response studies.