Eye Tracking

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Department for Transport (2016)
19% of crashes for both males and females are caused by ‘failing to look properly’; this is the number one reason for crashes in all age categories
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What does this suggest?
Driving safety is heavily influenced by where people are looking whilst they are controlling a vehicle
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What does eye tracking provide?
A naturalistic recording of eye movements and allows experimenters to record information such as time until first fixation, total fixation and dwell time (amount of eye movements) in regard to a specific location (developing hazard)
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How can eye tracking be used?
both simulated driving and real world driving by using vehicles that have tracking equipment in them
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What is one way eye tracking can be used to improve driver safety?
hazard perception
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What does hazard perception require?
The skill of anticipating, perceiving, and reacting to a hazard (Sagberg and Bjornskau, 2006)
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Eye tracking can be used to see how driving populations look at what?
developing hazard which can allow researchers to see why there may be deficits in hazard perception in some populations
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What did Underwood et al (2005) research?
Differences in scanning paths in novice and older drivers using eye tracking
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What were participants shown?
either hazardous or non-hazardous clips and were instructed to watch the clips and look at any event that would make the car take evasive action (a hazard)
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What were participants required to do when they saw a hazarrd?
Press and button to respond.
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What eye movements were measured to provide?
to provide a measure of first fixation to the hazard and develop a scan path
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What did the results find?
all participants spent significantly more time looking at road users (cars, pedestrians, cyclists) than both the environment and the actual road. This did not differ with age
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What did they find when the hazard was occurring?
Participants spent significantly longer looking at it and less time looking at the road itself
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By measuring scan paths what did they find?
they found that when a hazard occurred there was significantly reduced horizontal looking for all participants
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Therefore what does this suggest?
That novice and older drivers were able to detect hazards on the road and attended the information
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How else can eye tracking be used to gain understanding of the effects of cognitive load?
The effects of cognitive load
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What is cognitive load?
Refers to the amount of working memory resources that an individual has and can be manipulated through various tasks such as puzzle solving
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Savage et al (2013) what did the experimenter do?
o Used eye-tracking to investigate the effects of cognitive load on hazard perception o Participants watched hazard perception clips and their eye movements were recorded as well as RTs
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What happened in low cognitive load conditions?
P’s were presented with a simple statement such as “Mary is very talented at music”
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What happened in high cognitive load conditions?
P’s were presented with riddles such as “what has 6 legs but walks on 4”
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What was found?
P’s in high CL condition were sig slower to react to hazard and had sig smaller horizontal scan paths and that it took them sig longer for their first fixation onto the hazard.
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What does this provide evidence for?
the effect of cognitive load and driver preoccupation decreasing the hazard perception ability
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Therefore, eye tracking can be used to gain a useful insight into how drivers what?
can perceive hazards.
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What has evidence shown?
during hazard perception scan time and fixations increase on the developing hazard. However, when drivers are preoccupied then this decreases; making them unsafe and an increased crash risk
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What does this evidence provide?
it suggests that when drivers are distracted then they are slower to react at hazardous
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How can we further improve on this research?
research has been conducted to see what can cause distractions to drivers
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What did Strayer (2006) suggest about distractions?
highlights that distractions can occur due to the environment, the vehicle, or the driver
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Topolsek et al, 2016 use?
o Used eye-tracking to gain an understanding of what caused driver distractions in the environment
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What were participants given?
o 17 participants were given an on-road driving task where they were told to drive as they normally would, and they believed that the experiment was simply to measure how lighting affected the eye-tracking equipment
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What was eye tracking used to measure?
Fixations for each participant on different distractors
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How many distractors were there in total?
87 areas of interest including advertisements and traffic signs
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What did they find?
o They found a sig correlation between amount of detected road signs and amount of detected advertisements (so if a p saw more road signs they also saw more advertisements)
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How did they argue this?
Meant that some drivers could be classed as easily distractable and at larger risk of crash
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What did they find there was no evidence of?
age-related differences; so novice drivers (under 25) were not at an increased risk compared to older drivers (65+) or experienced drivers (25-65)
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This study provides evidence that road signs and advertisements can what?
Can distract drivers. However, it did not measure crash risk/hazard perception so fails to find a link between these two variables
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However what is a problem with this research?
No driver would have had the same experience of driving even if doing the same route
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Suggesting?
If a driver had no traffic around they would be more likely to look at the advertisements/road signs as there were no distractors around
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What has previous research highlighted?
how adverts can be distracting to drivers as they draw attention away from driving and increase cognitive load
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How can eye tracking be used?
Eye tracking can be used to see what type of adverts are most distracting which could help create regulations, such as banning certain types of adverts, to increase road user safety
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What did Chattington et al (2010) investigate?
Investigated the difference between static and dynamic adverts
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What Ps did they do?
48 Ps completed an on-road driving task and drove past various adverts that were either static (not moving) or dynamic (moving) whilst their eye movements were tracked
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What did results indicate?
when passing the adverts drivers spent longer looking at the video advert; made more fixations on video advert; had slower reactions to traffic situations in presence of video advert (had to brake harder); and showed increased lane movement
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What does this suggest?
That video adverts are significantly more distracting than static ones and could make driving less safe
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What are limitations about these studies?
 No 2 drivers will experience the same thing; less traffic=more eye movements cos no danger
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What did these studies not investigate?
how distraction and crash risk were linked. Just highlight the increase in driver danger but nothing to do with hazard perception
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Therefore what tests could be done?
Develop a HP test where participants could face distractors on the clips such as adverts and see if there is a difference in RT?
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What does this provide evidence in?
How eye-tracking can be used successfully to investigate the effect of distractions on driver safety
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What is another use of eye tracking?
is looking at the influence of fatigue and tiredness on driver safety
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What can fatigue be?
Fatigue can be either physical or mental and can be caused by poor sleep or medical conditions (such as diabetes)
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What can fatigue have?
A huge impact on driver safety and can lead to increase crash rates. This is because if a driver feels fatigued they are slower to attend and react to various hazards
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Xu et al (2019)
Looked at the influence of fatigue on taxi drivers, Found that increased working hours, lower rest, and less driving experience predicted increased crash risk
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What is one suggestion?
eye-tracking could be implemented into future cars as a safety measure
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What does the system monitor?
eye-movements to detect fatigue and issue a warning when the driver appears to be a danger
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Zhang and Zhang (2006)
Developed and tested a possible system that used eye-tracking to detect driver fatigue
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What did the eye tracking method measure?
alerted drivers that they were a danger when their eyes were shut for 5 consecutive frames
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What did it find?
Found that under test conditions the eye-tracking method had a 100% hit rate even when the driver had glasses or something slightly covering their eyes (e.g. hair)
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What does it suggest?
Eye tracking could be used successfully
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What does evidence suggest?
Systems could be used to improve safety
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Merat and Jamson (2013)
Shift workers completed a driving simulator task where their eye-movements were monitored
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What had workers come back from?
completing a night shift (fatigued) or were coming from lunch (not fatigued)
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What did results find?
that there was a difference in level of tiredness between groups as fatigued drivers had increased eye closures (and for longer durations)
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Eye tracking also showed what?
fatigued drivers had less lateral eye movements and lower scan paths
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What are the ethics?
Could using eye-tracking to measure fatigue be unethical in some cases (for example should the car still be allowed to drive if the system has detected the driver is fatigued and dangerous?)
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Firstly what is a limitation of eye tracking?
doesn’t tell us exactly what is going on in the brain. Eye-tracking can provide useful information about where, and for how long, drivers look at something but cannot tell us about the brain areas that are implemented in driving
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What does this need?
cognitive neuroscience research, for example the use of fMRI to see brain changes during hazard perception tests (Kok, 2017)
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What can eye tracking be used?
on-road driving but this has an issue that every participant will experience a different drive, even if doing the same route. Some participants may have a hazard free ride whereas others will encounter hazard
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What is the best option?
o Driving simulator
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Why?
this reflects real world driving as participants are still in control of the car but every participant can have the same route and experiences
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however?
this also has limitations as participants may not react naturally as there is no consequences of their actions
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For example?
they may not be looking out for hazards as precisely as they would in real life as they are not in a dangerous situation
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IF people are aware that their eye movements are being tracked they may what?
- If people are aware that their eye-movements are being tracked, they may begin to act differently (Hawthrone effect).
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What does this mean?
This means that they may increase their visual search and fixations compared to when they are driving normally. This is not a limitation of cognitive neuroscience as you can’t change brain activation
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What does this suggest?

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Driving safety is heavily influenced by where people are looking whilst they are controlling a vehicle

Card 3

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What does eye tracking provide?

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Card 4

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How can eye tracking be used?

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Card 5

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What is one way eye tracking can be used to improve driver safety?

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