Risk awareness and criticality assessment of driving situations: a comparative study between motorcyclists and car drivers

The general framework is about risk awareness through the aspect of cognitive abilities - to perceive and assess the criticality of a driving situation - among motorcyclists against car drivers. To study risk awareness, some tools based on video films of road scenes have been developed. The experimental task consists in assessing the criticality of dynamic driving situations, via a Likert scale, and qualifying these situations using Osgood´s semantic differential. The results show that, on the whole, motorcyclists consider the sample of driving situations as less critical than car drivers do. The main differences observed between the two populations are presented.