They say more research is needed to find if intentionally training drivers to look out for motorcycles would lead to few LBFTS crashes or fewer instances of inattentional blindness for motorcycles.
Pammer, K. Allocating attention to detect motorcycles: The role of inattentional blindness. Human Factors. DOI: Cohen, M. Natural-scene perception requires attention. Psychological Science Most, S. What you see is what you set: Sustained inattentional blindness and the capture of awareness. Psychological Review , 1 , First, it is typically not defined. What does that term mean?
We have reified this term; its not useful. I applaud the authors of this article. Changing behaviour requires us to give up ideas that get in the way of trying to understand mental processes, and are a necessary preliminary to effecting change.
APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. I can't say for sure, because I wouldn't be able to see them. But there are things that move quickly enough, and are small enough, that we don't necessarily "see" them even when they are right in front of us. As you might guess, motorcycles fall into that category of things that we don't always perceive even if they are right in our field of vision.
A motorcycle approaching head-on from a distance occupies a very small part of a driver's vision. If it's going quickly, it's possible that the eye simply won't get around to looking at it enough to make it "stick" in the brain before it arrives in the driver's immediate vicinity.
That part is important because the brain can really only see things that it understands. Your brain has a sort of visual shorthand for objects. For instance, chances are that you aren't really seeing everything around you right now, especially if you are in a familiar environment. You're just seeing the shortcuts that your brain is placing there to conserve processing power and attention. That's why people become fatigued more easily in foreign countries or really unfamiliar terrain; their brain is working overtime trying to account for all the things that it doesn't normally see.
For this same reason, if you don't expect to see a motorcycle or pedestrian during a certain part of your morning commute, your brain will often ignore a motorcycle or pedestrian right in front of you, particularly if they aren't moving sideways across your field of vision. Let's take a typical case. A driver is preparing to turn left from a side road onto a main road. There's a GSXR flying down that main road because what's the point of having something that fast if you don't wind it out, right?
So our driver looks left and doesn't see the Gixxer because it's pretty far away. He looks right. Now he looks left again. The bike is much closer, almost on him, but because he didn't see it last time—and this is important—his brain simply discards the Gixxer as a result of his brain not expecting to see it.
His brain is already busy doing this discarding for everything from his blind spot to various floaters in his vision to his own eyelashes. What's the harm in adding just one more object? And the driver will tell the cop, "I didn't see him. But there truly is that third possibility: The driver looked right at the Suzuki but failed to truly "see" him. This sort of thing happens with bicycles and pedestrians as well, of course, but it doesn't happen nearly as often because bikes and people tend to move slowly compared to a motorcycle.
It happens even more often when people are stressed or frightened, because these emotions tend to freeze up the muscles, including the muscles of the eyes. When that happens, you get tunnel vision , which is simply the eye refusing to do its normal tracking deal and the brain helpfully filling in all the areas away from the eye's fixed center focus with plain black. Tunnel vision is why I work very hard to keep my novice trackday students from being next to another car on track.
They literally won't see the car next to them because their eyes won't move enough to pick up that visual information and add it to their visual map. The same is true, of course, for people who are learning how to drive on the street for the first time. The field of vision for those drivers is very small. So, let's go back to my neighbor. The passes continue for roughly a minute, during which a man in a gorilla suit ambles onto the screen, thumps his chest and leaves.
Shockingly, half of all people who watch the video and count the passes miss the gorilla entirely. So how does this phenomenon translate to the street? They expect intersections, minivans, road signals and mail trucks, but usually not motorcycles.
As such, when drivers looks down a street they expect to be clear or only have cars, they can completely miss a biker coming toward them. Additional distracting driving stimuli like texting, eating and phone conversations can, of course, only further exacerbate this problem.
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