Developing attentional control in naturalistic dynamic road crossing situations

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Jean-Charles, Geraldine, Caldara, Roberto, Miellet, Sebastien and Nicholls, Victoria (2019) Developing attentional control in naturalistic dynamic road crossing situations.

In the last 20 years, there has been increasing interest in studying visual attentional processes under more natural conditions. In the present study, we propose to determine the critical age at which children show similar to adult performance and attentional control in a visually guided task; in a naturalistic dynamic and socially relevant context: road crossing. We monitored visual exploration and crossing decisions in adults and children aged between 5 and 15 while they watched road traffic videos containing a range of traffic densities with or without pedestrians. 5-10 year old (y/o) children showed less systematic gaze patterns. More specifically, adults and 11-15 y/o children look mainly at the vehicles' appearing point, which is an optimal location to sample diagnostic information for the task. In contrast, 5-10 y/os look more at socially relevant stimuli and attend to moving vehicles further down the trajectory when the traffic density is high. Critically, 5-10 y/o children also make an increased number of crossing decisions compared to 11-15 y/os and adults. Our findings reveal a critical shift around 10 y/o in attentional control and crossing decisions in a road crossing task.

Dataset Details

Research / Data Type:

Database

Creators:

Creators	Email
Jean-Charles, Geraldine	UNSPECIFIED
Caldara, Roberto	UNSPECIFIED
Miellet, Sebastien	smiellet@bournemouth.ac.uk
Nicholls, Victoria	vnicholls@bournemouth.ac.uk

Groups:

Faculty of Science & Technology

Collection period:

From	To
January 2016	May 2016

Date:

12 March 2019

Date type:

Publication

Data collection method:

Participants. 67 participants were recruited: 57 aged between five and 15, and 10 adult controls aged between 20 and 40 (mean = 24, SD = 3). All children were recruited in schools in the Fribourg canton, Switzerland. Adults were recruited from the University of Fribourg. All participants had normal or corrected to normal vision. The study was approved by the Department of Psychology ethics committee at the University of Fribourg. Informed consent was obtained from the schools, parents, children, and adult controls prior to taking part in the study. This study was performed in accordance with all appropriate institutional and international guidelines and regulations, in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Apparatus. During the experiment participants' eye movements were recorded at a sampling rate of 1000 Hz with the SR-Research EyeLink 1000 (with a chin and forehead rest), which has an average gaze position error of 0.25°, a spatial resolution of 0.01°, and a linear output range over the range of the monitor used. Only the dominant eye was tracked. Stimuli were presented on an HP monitor with a screen resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, a width of 521 mm and a height of 293 mm, a horizontal viewing angle of 46.9° and a vertical viewing angle of 27.4° at a distance of 600 mm. The experiment was coded in Matlab66 using Psychophysics (PTB-3) and EyeLink Toolbox extensions67,68. Calibrations for eye fixations were conducted at the beginning of the experiment using a nine-point fixation procedure as implemented in the EyeLink API (see EyeLink Manual) and using Matlab software. Calibrations were then validated with EyeLink software and repeated until the optimal calibration criterion was reached. Experimental Design. At the beginning of the experiment participants were informed that they would be presented with a series of videos of road crossing situations on screen and that they would have to indicate by pressing the spacebar on a keyboard when they could cross the road and hold the button pressed for as long as they thought it was safe to cross. Participants were instructed to focus on approaching vehicles on the side of the road closest to them (see Fig. 4a for a capture of the scene). Vehicles travelled at an average velocity of 50 km/h. Each trial started with the presentation of a central fixation cross. Once the participants had fixated on the cross a blank screen was presented for 500 ms and then the video clip for the trial was presented (see Fig. 4a). Each trial was followed by another blank screen for 500 ms and the next trial started with the central cross. 100 trials were presented to the participants each with a different video clip, each lasting 10 seconds. All video clips were filmed at a real road crossing in Fribourg with a variety of traffic densities, with or without pedestrians and cyclists (distractors). Number of presses for each trial were collected and analysed for the purpose of the present experiment.

Statement on legal, ethical and access issues:

The study was approved by the Department of Psychology ethics committee at the University of Fribourg. Informed consent was obtained from the schools, parents, children, and adult controls prior to taking part in the study. This study was performed in accordance with all appropriate institutional and international guidelines and regulations, in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Funder name(s):

Swiss National Science Foundation

Grant reference number(s):

100019_156541

Keywords:

Visual attention, eye tracking, cognitive psychology, road crossing

Status:

Published

Publisher:

Open Science Framework

University of Fribourg

Contact email address:

bordar@bournemouth.ac.uk

Record Details

DOI:	https://doi.org/10.18746/bmth.data.00000169
Depositing User:	Victoria Nicholls
Year Deposited:	25 Jun 2021 16:11
Revision:	21
Last Modified:	15 Jun 2022 10:58

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