Anticipatory skills are a potential factor for novice drivers' curve accidents. Behavioural data show that steering and speed regulation are affected by forward planning of the trajectory. When approaching a curve, the relevant visual information for online steering control and for planning is located at different eccentricities, creating a need to disengage the gaze from the guidance of steering to anticipatory look-ahead fixations over curves. With experience, peripheral vision can be increasingly used in the visual guidance of steering. This could leave experienced drivers more gaze time to invest on look-ahead fixations over curves, facilitating the trajectory planning. Eighteen drivers (nine novices, nine experienced) drove an instrumented vehicle on a rural road four times in both directions. Their eye movements were analyzed in six curves. The trajectory of the car was modelled and divided to approach, entry and exit phases. Experienced drivers spent less time on the road-ahead and more time on the look-ahead fixations over the curves. Look-ahead fixations were also more common in the approach than in the entry phase of the curve. The results suggest that with experience drivers allocate greater part of their visual attention to trajectory planning.

Abstract. Research on empathy has increased rapidly during the last decades but brief assessment methods are not easily available. The aim was to develop a test for affective empathic reactions which would be simple to translate into different languages, easy to use in a variety of research settings, and which would catch the empathic reactions at the moment they arise. We describe the development and validation of the Pictorial Empathy Test (PET) in three studies (Study 1, N = 91; Study 2, N = 2,789; and Study 3, N = 114). The PET includes seven photographs about distressed individuals and the participants are asked to rate on a 5-point scale how emotionally moving they find the photograph. The results indicated that the PET displayed a unitary factor structure and it had high internal consistency and good seven-month test-retest reliability. In addition, the results supported convergent and discriminant validity of the test. The results suggest that the PET is a useful addition to the prevailing methods for assessing affective empathy.

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