In-depth surveys of road traffic accidents have shown that a number of them are attributed to one or more of the involved road users having looked in the appropriate direction(s) but failed to see the person or vehicle with whom/which they collided. Such explanations almost invariably derive from subjective accounts of causation offered by offending road users and/or by police officers recording their accidents and/or by members of the multi-disciplinary research teams which launched these in-depth surveys at the sites of accidents shortly after they occurred. This Review was therefore commissioned with the following objectives: • To review the accident literature in order to estimate the magnitude of the problem, to investigate the types of road user for whom it is most likely to be recorded, and to evaluate the road and traffic situations in which it is most likely to be recorded. • To evaluate the probability that the reported problem represents a genuine psychological phenomenon of attention, perception and cognition (that is, the road user at fault actually looked in the appropriate direction(s), the object collided with was visible within their visual field, yet the visible object did not enter consciousness as a relevant hazard), relative to a number of alternative predictable possibilities. • To consider whether the phenomenon, if genuine, is researchable and, if so, to recommend methods by which its psychological basis may be most satisfactorily understood and appropriate counter-measures taken. (Author/publisher)
Abstract