The U.S. driver education and training literature was reviewed to identify rules and/or recommendations with regard to driver eye scanning behaviour and strategies, where a driver ought to fixate his eyes when driving, specifically when driving through a curve. In addition, driver eye scanning behaviour was recorded and analyzed for 9 drivers driving through 240 feet radius right curves at night with low beams. An instrumented car with a corneal reflection technique television eye scanning system was used. Of most importance for the eye fixation sequence analysis were the eye fixation positions on the curves ahead of the car. Matrices and histograms were established to indicate the conditional frequencies for forward and backward progressing eye fixation sequences, given a previous type of eye fixation sequence. The results showed that the expected number of consecutive forward eye fixations (including forward ending eye fixations) is1.89, while that of backward eye fixations (including backward ending eye fixations) is 1.26. The results of this exploratory study indicate that drivers use both forward and backward eye fixation sequences and that there appears to exist no predictable simple, systematic eye fixation sequence patterns within a driver (within a run or between runs) or between drivers such as a repeating sequence of one or two fixations far ahead (possibly for perception of curvature, directional control and obstacle detection) followed by one or two fixations closer in towards the car (possibly for lateral control) when driving through a curve.
Abstract