Driver behaviour in unexpected critical events and in repeated exposures – a comparison

• Published in: European transport research review Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 51 - 60
• Main Authors: Benderius, Ola, Markkula, Gustav, Wolff, Krister, Wahde, Mattias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-03-2014; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Automobile driving; Automobiles; Automotive Engineering; Behavior; Behavioural; Civil Engineering; Correlation analysis; Driver behaviour; Driver modelling; Drivers; Driving simulator; Engineering; Evasive steering; Experiments; Exposure; Original Paper; Regional/Spatial Science; Repeated exposures; Roads & highways; Simulation; Simulators; Statistical tests; Steering; Transportation; Truck drivers; Sweden; Driver modelling; Driver behaviour; Repeated exposures; Driving simulator; Evasive steering
• ISSN: 1867-0717; 1866-8887; 1866-8887
• DOI: 10.1007/s12544-013-0108-y

Purpose
This paper aims to determine how truck driver steering behaviour seen in repeated exposures to acritical event correlates to the behaviour resulting from an unexpected exposure to the same event.
Methods
Test subjects were exposed to an unexpected critical event in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Next, a slightly modified version of the scenario was repeated several times for each subject. The driver behaviour was then analysed using standard statistical tests.
Results
It was found that, in general, drivers keep most of their steering behaviour characteristics between test settings (unexpected and repeated). This is particularly interesting sincea similar kind of behaviour preservation is generally not found in the case of
braking
behaviour. In fact, onlyone significant difference was found between the two test settings, namely regarding time-to-collision at steering initiation.
Conclusions
In experiments involving both an unexpected event and several repeated events one can,at least in some cases, design the repeated event such that behavioural data collected from that setting can beused along with data from the unexpected setting. Using this procedure, one can significantly increase the amount of collected data, something that can strongly benefit, for example, driver modelling.