This paper reports a field study in the USA, where subjects performed a recognition task while seated in the front and rear passenger seats of a car with low-beam lamps. While the car was driven at constant speed along a dark road at night, each subject had to press a response button, whenever a pedestrian was recognised on or alongside the road ahead of the car. The pedestrians, at various locations on the route, used four retroflector configurations. In the first three, they wore retroreflective stripes on the torso, or wrists and ankles, or over the major body joints; they wore no retroreflectors in the fourth. 16 male and 16 female drivers of various ages were chosen as subjects; each of them had two trials with each pedestrian group. The subjects were used in pairs, one in the right front seat and one in the left rear seat. The first experimenter sat in the car's right rear seat, instructed the subjects, and performed other tasks; the second drove the car, two others were pedestrians, and the fifth was a cyclist. The main finding was that retroreflective markings attached to the limbs, whether wrists and ankles or joints, had significantly longer recognition distances than pedestrians with markings attached to the torso. Some areas for further research are suggested.
Abstract