Emotional and cognitive mechanisms in hazard prediction and orienting skills: evidence from physiological and eye-tracking measures

Abstract

Hazard prediction and attentional orienting play a critical role in road safety interventions aimed at reducing accident risk. Two complementary studies employed the Hazard Prediction–Orienting (HP-O) task to examine the independent contributions of driving experience and attentional orienting to hazard prediction performance. The studies integrated measures of behavioural accuracy, eye movements, and physiological responses. Attentional orienting was manipulated through invalid, valid, and simple trials. Study I compared 20 novice and 20 experienced drivers on behavioural measures, and a sample of 17 per group on psychophysiological measures following the exclusion of six participants due to signal artefacts. Study II examined behavioural performance and eye movement measures within the HP-O paradigm in a sample of 17 inexperienced and 18 experienced drivers. Across both studies, driving experience and trial type independently predicted HP-O task accuracy: experienced drivers consistently outperformed inexperienced drivers, and accuracy was highest in simple trials, followed by valid and invalid trials. Psychophysiological significant findings from Study I showed that phasic cardiac responses were largest during invalid trials, reflecting an orienting response to unexpected or incongruent information. Eye-tracking data from Study II revealed that inexperienced drivers exhibited longer fixation durations and higher detection rates of potential or irrelevant hazard areas, suggesting less efficient attentional allocation. In contrast, experienced drivers produced larger saccadic amplitudes and more fixations per trial, reflecting broader and more flexible visual scanning strategies. The findings demonstrate that misleading attentional cues impair hazard prediction, and driving experience is associated with differences in hazard prediction and visual search performance.