The literature on traffic behaviour covers a wide range of psychological phenomena, ranging from personality and lifestyle to gear-shifting. Although many of these studies make an important contribution to our understanding of driving, many of them suffer from an inability to consider driver behaviour as a whole. The studies are mainly focusing on particular groups of findings with no attempts at a more general integration. One reason for this may be that the driver is looked upon only as a possible agent of a failure, and the different types of failures are then studied separately and in a rather narrow, safety-oriented way. A failure and accident oriented analysis of a driver's task also produces a rather narrow picture of a person, and describes mainly the "pathological" aspects of driver behaviour. One way of conceptualising driver behaviour and also the topics for research is to use a hierarchical approach. The aim of this presentation is to describe and compare hierarchical models of driver behaviour and evaluate advantages and disadvantages of these models to the goals of traffic psychological research and applications. For the covering abstract see ITRD E113725 (C 22328 CD-ROM).
Samenvatting