A study of gazing behavior and individual characteristics of young people using videos of car driving

In Japan, which has entered a super-aged society, there are many research cases on car driving and accidents involving elderly people, while there are few research cases on young people, who have the second highest number of road accidents after the elderly. This present study focused on young people, who are likely to be perpetrators of road accidents and used a JAF-produced hazard prediction training video and an eye-tracking system to group subjects according to the degree of their gazing behaviour while driving. Furthermore, an interview survey was conducted with the subjects to ascertain their attitudes during the video viewing, as well as their attributes, such as frequency of driving and image of driving. The results of the eye-tracking system analysis and results of the interview survey confirm that even subjects who are anxious about driving have little effect on the degree of gazing during video viewing. It was also confirmed that even subjects who were confident in their driving skills were unable to adequately predict hazards due to assumptions made while driving. As an evaluation of the results of this study, the staff of the driving school gave an assessment that, “If the gazing behavior according to individual characteristics could be visualised in the room, effective and efficient instruction would be possible.” In addition, a police station employee gave the following evaluation, “As the results of this study utilised live-action video, the technology for gazing characteristics can be expected to promote awareness of the subjects.”