It is often claimed that road users have a poor knowledge of traffic rules and signs. Then, their behavior may vary from the expected behavior, producing errors and accidents into the road network. From the point of view of context-dependent road signs meaning, this paper is aimed at understanding how a loosing knowledge process can be built up during the driving experience. Contrary to novice drivers that learn the univocal meaning of road signs, expert drivers get low scores about the meaning of road panels that are made of icons and of graphic signs. This is a surprising case of practice lessening performance. It is argued that the meaning of road signs is built in the context of the driver task and in the context of the current road situation. An experiment showed that expert drivers fail to the what does it mean-question when road signs are displayed in isolation or in the context of a real road situation, but they succeed with the what to do-questioning.The whole set of 300 road signs both from their surface properties (form, color, icons, etc.) and from the required actions were described. The road signalization system appears to bex system that is not fully coherent since surface properties partially match the corresponding actions properties. Finally,it is advocated that contextual graphs capture the effects of task and road context, as well as the automatization and proceduralization processes since it permits encapsulation of action sequences (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see E217780.
Abstract