Effects of nonvisual secondary tasks on driver´s gazing behavior for pedestrians

Estimating the situation awareness of a driver is very important for driving safety support systems. The most frequent type of fatal traffic accident in Japan involves pedestrians´ being hit by drivers of “aimless driving” status. In this study, we investigate drivers´ gazing behavior for detecting pedestrians. To make subjects think of other things and engage in “aimless driving,” we gave them nonvisual secondary tasks of four difficulty levels. We analyzed the experiment result and confirmed that in trials involving heavy secondary tasks, the drivers´ accuracy of pedestrian tracking degraded and the subjects did not see pedestrians.