vernon levy said:Quoted message said:A fascinating review by a cycling psychologist into why SMIDSY's happen.
Lots of good stuff to reflect on and learn from.
http://staff.bath.ac.uk/pssiw/cognitive/WalkerVulnerableReview.pdf
For some reason the document crashes my browser so at the risk of
repeating information contained in the pdf:
There has also been two articles published in Bike magazine which attempt to
explain two types of SMIDSY, one through a physical impediment and one
through a perceptual impediment.
Funny, checked and it opens fine in my Firefox browser. But it suggests
a third very different reason to the two in Bike.
"The main identified cause of collisions to bicyclists is a process
described in the context of general driver psychology by Hills (1980)
and Moray (1990), and more recently in the specific case of bicycling by
Räsänen and Summala (1998). People have a highly limited ability to
receive visual information, being able to fixate on fewer than three
points per second at the very maximum (Moray, 1990). To compensate for
this, after more than a few hours’ experience of a complex task like
driving they develop mental models of what goes on in their
surroundings. These mental models – expectations, in other words – guide
attention to the areas of the surrounding scene most likely to be
important. Because a typical driver’s encounters are predominantly with
motor vehicles, their expectation will usually be that only other
automobiles will be present at a junction. This expectation guides their
attention to motor vehicles and parts of the road where these might be
found and away from cyclists and areas where these tend to be.
<snip>
The expectation-attention process is seen even more dramatically in the
‘looked-but-failed-to-see phenomenon’ (Hills, 1980), whereby even a
driver looking in the right direction to see a cyclist might not become
consciously aware that the cyclist is there. This most commonly happens
with more experienced drivers (Herslund & Jørgensen, 2003), precisely
because these are more likely to have habitual search patterns which
focus attention in very narrow regions of the visual scene likely to
contain motor traffic; regions of space likely to contain cyclists
(e.g., the edge of the road) receive less attention (Herslund &
Jørgensen, 2003; Hills, 1980; Moray, 1990; see also Joshi, Senior, &
Smith, 2001; Mannering & Grodsky, 1995)."
He goes on to link this to the studies we all know showing cycling to be
safer the more people cycle, because cyclists get built into the
expectations model, cyclist road positioning and also to some
interesting observations and research (on turning right onto crossing
pedestrians) to back it up:
"Houten et al. (2000) tested a system where the pedestrians were given a
3-second head-start before cars were given a green light. This greatly
reduced the number of conflicts between pedestrians and motorists.
Presumably, given the expectation–attention model we have discussed, the
system worked because by the time motorists rounded the corner, the
pedestrians were in the middle of the road, where drivers focus their
attention. This is similar to the bicycle safety advice mentioned above,
which similarly identified being in the middle of the carriageway as safer."
--
Tony
"I did make a mistake once - I thought I'd made a mistake but I hadn't"
Anon
