Owens, Antonoff and Francis (1994) suggest that biological motion (‘biomotion’)`clothing highlighting the joints of the body increases the conspicuity of moving pedestrians at night. Using recent accident data to simulate a typical collision environment, a CCD camera filmed a ten-minute car journey in which a pedestrian wearing one of two types of retroreflective clothing appeared on the road, either in motion or stationary. It was hypothesised that moving pedestrians would be detected at greater distances when wearing 'biomotion' clothing, but not when wearing a standard vest. In a between-subjects design, participants viewed films and pressed a button when they detected the pedestrian. They then rated the difficulty of the task. Across all conditions, 75% of subjects did not see the pedestrian at distances further than 20m and one third of subjects did not detect the pedestrian at all. Missed detections were more prevalent in the conditions where the pedestrian was stationary than when the pedestrian walked in place. Relative to the vest, biomotion clothing did not significantly increase detection distance in either moving or stationary conditions, although for both clothings moving pedestrians were detected significantly further away than stationary pedestrians. Ratings of task difficulty matched this pattern. The results do not support the hypothesis that biological motion affords recognition at greater distances than does standard motion. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting