Where Do Pedestrians Look When Crossing? A State of the Art of the Eye-Tracking Studies

Abstract

It has been widely shown in the literature that analysing eye movements and positions can provide useful information for a better understanding of human perception and cognition. The eye-tracking technology, as a process of measuring where people look, has established itself as a widespread means of studying visual information processing in several domains, including in the study of human walking. Streetcrossing can be defined as a particular form of walking. Indeed, several elements have to be considered in the decision-making process, such as the distance headway, traffic density, vehicle speed, etc. It is also a very risky aspect of walking as pedestrians are considered one of the most vulnerable road users. In this paper, we present an up-to-date comprehensive review of existing eye-tracking experiments in the literature, from the pedestrian's point of view, with a view to study the effects of both internal (e.g., age) and external (e.g., road environment) factors on pedestrians' road crossing gaze behaviour. Furthermore, the current gaps in the literature are then discussed in order to open up some future perspectives in the field, such as the forthcoming introduction of automated vehicles on the roads. INDEX TERMS Eye-tracking, visual attention, street-crossing, pedestrians, automated vehicles LUCIE LÉVÊQUE received the M.Eng. degree in cognitive engineering from the

Pedestrians’ overt attention affects time-to-arrival estimates of oncoming traffic

“…Our study has some notable limitations. While we contrasted time-to-arrival estimates for different gaze locations that have previously been found to be frequently sampled by pedestrians (Lévêque et al, 2020) While limiting our ability to monitor gaze and precisely control response latencies, the use of an online experiment procedure enabled us to test time-to-arrival perception in a relatively large and diverse sample (here specifically in terms of age). The convergence of our results with classical laboratory studies indicates good validity, suggesting that similar online experiments could be a suitable approach to test the role of gaze in different road traffic scenarios.…”

“…On the other hand, even the minute eye movements performed spontaneously influence the perception of relevant motion parameters such as the time-toarrival of an approaching vehicle (Sudkamp, Bocian & Souto, in press). Eye tracking studies investigating gaze behavior in road-crossing demonstrate that visual exploration varies with individual factors of a pedestrian (e.g., age) and the visual composition of the road environment (e.g., type of intersection; see Lévêque, Ranchet, Deniel, Bornard & Bellet, 2020 for a review). Yet, little focus has so far been given to the question of how visual exploration affects pedestrians' motion perception in road-crossing.…”

Context-empowered Visual Attention Prediction in Pedestrian Scenarios

“…The visual behavior of pedestrians in a street crossing situation is influenced by the concrete layout of the street [13,41], but also to a large extent by the existence of the time pressure [48,2]. Due to its importance to traffic safety, pedestrian attention has been studied extensively in human science [2,14,20,61].…”

Interaction between pedestrians and automated vehicles: Perceived safety of yielding behaviors and benefits of an external human–machine interface for elderly people

“…The Fatality Analysis Reporting System of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA (2017) , revealed that more than 25% of pedestrians’ fatal crashes were caused by a lack of communication and mistaken assumptions about others’ actions. Street-crossing situations involve a complex decision-making process based on several factors ( Lévêque et al, 2020 ). In this context, and especially when ambiguities remain regarding priority rules (i.e., non-signalized crossing), pedestrians and car drivers tend to interact using non-verbal communication (e.g., facial expressions, eye contacts, gestures, and body movements) in order to clarify their intentions.…”