Citation

Steyers FJJM. Vis. Veh. 1993; 4: 203-212.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1993, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The appreciation of the visual road environment may influence driving performance, especially on long trips in non-demanding situations. Effects like highway hypnosis may be due to too-little stimulation from the road scene. In order to explore the drivers' experience and appreciation of the road environment, a rating scale was made from a list of constructs that were elicited from viewing environments on slides. This road environment construct list (RECL) was applied to differentiate between the appreciation of two roads that had different relative accident rates. The roads were technically similar, but differed in their environmental setting. Therefore, it was assumed that the context may cause a difference in appreciation, which in turn might contribute to accident causation. The roads were presented in two daylight and two traffic-density conditions. Two experiments were carried out. In the first experiment the roads were presented by slides, in the second they were presented by films. Principal component analysis showed that the scoring of the RECL was based on three factors, that were identical for the two experiments. The factors were labelled "hedonic value", "activational value" and "perceptual variation". Composite scores for these factors appeared to differentiate between the two roads, especially in the situation of low traffic density in daylight. Suggestions will be discussed to validate these factors with additional measures, such as eye movements and heart rate measures. Extension of the stimulus set and the presentation modes will be proposed as well.