Understanding Situational Awareness Behavior of Pedestrian Using an Eye Tracker in the Field

Abstract

Despite many studies on exploring the behaviors of pedestrians crossing the road, very less studies are done combining visual characteristics and pedestrian and traffic characteristics of pedestrian at signalised and unsignalised intersection. The study focuses on understanding situational awareness of pedestrian while crossing an intersection. A field experiment was performed with 14 participants in unsignalised intersection in Delhi and 18 participants in signalised intersection at Dehradun using an eye-tracker. Pedestrian walking and traffic characteristics were extracted from video graphic data collected from the test location, and visual characteristics were extracted through eye-tracker data. The situational awareness assessment of pedestrian was conducted by evaluating head turn by pedestrian during crossing. Result indicated that with an increment in pedestrian speed, pedestrian are less likely to be situationally aware. But with increase in crossing initiation duration, pedestrian are more likely to be situationally aware in case of unsignalised intersection while they are less likely to be situationally aware in case of signalised intersection. The current findings help in better understanding of pedestrians’ walking and visual attention behaviour and their association towards situational awareness behaviour.