Do cyclists make better drivers? Associations between cycling experience and change detection in road scenes

Beanland, Vanessa; Hansen, Lisa J. · 2017 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2017.07.013

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Summary

This study investigates whether cycling experience influences the visual attention and hazard perception of drivers, addressing the broader question of how cross-modal transportation experiences affect situation awareness. While previous research has established that driving experience shapes attentional allocation, less is known about whether experience with other road users, such as cyclists, transfers to improved driving performance. The authors hypothesized that drivers who also cycle regularly would demonstrate superior change detection abilities in road scenes compared to drivers without cycling experience, potentially due to enhanced general situation awareness or specific attentional biases toward cyclists. The experiment employed a change detection flicker task with 42 experienced drivers, divided into two groups: 22 cyclist-drivers who rode on public roads at least weekly, and 20 drivers who did not use other road vehicles. Participants viewed alternating pairs of road scene photographs, determining whether the images were identical or differed by a single detail. The changed targets were systematically manipulated to be either a road sign, car, pedestrian, or bicycle, and the changes involved either moving or removing the object. Accuracy and response times (RT) were analyzed using Generalized Estimating Equations to account for repeated measures and missing data. The results revealed significant effects of change target on both accuracy and RT, but no significant difference in accuracy between the two groups. All participants were slower and less accurate at detecting changes to road signs compared to moving road users (cars, pedestrians, bicycles). However, cyclist-drivers were significantly faster than non-cycling drivers at identifying changes, with an average RT advantage of 615 milliseconds. This speed advantage was most pronounced when the change target was a bicycle or a road sign. The study controlled for potential confounds such as object size and distance from the image center, finding no correlation between these physical attributes and RT, suggesting the effects were driven by cognitive factors rather than visual salience. The findings suggest that cycling experience is associated with more efficient attentional processing of road scenes. The superior performance of cyclist-drivers implies that multi-modal experience may enhance general situation awareness, allowing drivers to detect hazards more rapidly. The specific advantage in detecting bicycle changes indicates an attentional bias toward familiar road users, while the improved detection of road signs suggests a broader benefit in monitoring static environmental cues. The authors conclude that the 615ms RT advantage could provide critical additional time for hazard avoidance, potentially reducing collision severity. This study highlights the value of diverse transportation experiences in shaping driver cognition and safety.

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Topics

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• inattentional change blindness
• vru conspicuity
• hazard perception
• looked but failed to see
• peripheral attention
• motorcycle conspicuity

Information type

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• Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data