Organisation: Sussex Police & University of Sussex
Date uploaded: 12th December 2011
Date published/launched: Pre 2009
This presentation was first delivered at the RoSPA Road Safety Congress 2006. It provides an introduction to 'Human Factors' and highlights some of the psychological processes the brain undertakes that we use to formulate our decisions and actions.
Urban environments are where drivers undertake a visual search for hazards and the crash statistics shows that this is where a high number of crashes occur. We present a summary of our work that has investigated:
• How long will drivers search for hazards at an intersection?
• Will junction design affect the time they will spend doing it?
• Where might experienced and novice drivers look?
• What might they notice/ react to at a typical intersection?
This presentation focuses on our psychological limitations and discusses the concept of ‘Feature Integration’ and how the brain processes what we see by the creation of objects and features. It demonstrates that observation and recall depend on attention, abstraction and memory.
By highlighting this fundamental limitation of our mental processing it seeks to explain why, if you have five witnesses to an event, you can end up with five totally different accounts. It also demonstrates driver processing and decision making times at junctions.
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