Did You See Me?: Assessing Perceptual vs. Real Driving Gains Across Multi-Modal Pedestrian Alert Systems

Abstract

In-vehicle support systems have the potential to reduce the risk of pedestrian collisions and promote gains in braking performance and visual attention when scanning for threats on the road. This study investigated changes in driver behavior in pedestrian collision scenarios with increasing urgency while using varying levels of pedestrian alert system (PAS) support in a medium fidelity driving simulator. During pedestrian collision scenarios, we assessed drivers' eye gaze behavior, braking performance, and acceptance ratings across three levels of PAS and four levels of increasing urgency, defined as time to collision (TTC). Results suggest that both audio- and visually-based PAS do not produce gains in the localization of pedestrians, but can nevertheless improve drivers' braking performance in events where pedestrians may pose a threat. Our results further suggest that drivers exhibit both innate and direct confidence in visually-based PAS support, despite no concurrent gains in visual scanning performance.