When people notice one traffic hazard, they are less likely to see a simultaneous second hazard, according to new research from North Carolina State University.
When people notice one traffic hazard, they are less likely to see a simultaneous second hazard, according to new research from North Carolina State University. The finding has potential applications for both driver training and the development of automated, in-vehicle safety technologies.
“This is a phenomenon called a subsequent search miss (SSM), which was first described in the context of doctors evaluating medical images – their ability to spot a problem was hindered if they had already found another problem in the same image,” says Jing Feng, corresponding author of a paper on the research and an associate professor of psychology at NC State. “We wanted to determine whether SSMs might impact driving safety. What we’ve found suggests that SSMs may play an important role.”
To test this, researchers conducted three studies. Each study asked participants to evaluate 100 traffic images and identify any potential hazards that would prevent them from driving in a given direction. Each image contained between zero and two hazards. Some hazards were “high-salience” targets, meaning they were glaringly obvious – like a red sports car. Other hazards were low-salience targets, such as drably dressed pedestrians.
Read more at North Carolina State University
Image: When people notice one traffic hazard, they are less likely to see a simultaneous second hazard, according to new research from NC State. The study used images like the one shown here. Viewers were less likely to notice the jogger on the left when the bicyclist was also in the image. (Credit: Robert Sall, NC State University)
