Driver's visual attention to different categories of roadside advertising signs
DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2019.03.001
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Summary
This study investigates driver visual attention to six distinct categories of roadside advertising signs in a naturalistic driving setting, addressing a gap in previous research that focused primarily on billboards. The authors aimed to determine how sign category, placement, and design parameters influence fixation rate, duration, and distance, thereby assessing the potential for distraction. The six categories examined were billboards, vendor signs, single and multiple commercial directional signs, movable display boards, and gas price LED displays. The experiment involved 15 participants driving a 30-km route along a single-carriageway road that included both rural and urban segments. Eye movements were recorded using mobile eye-tracking equipment synchronized with vehicle kinematic data. The route contained 154 advertising signs, and researchers analyzed fixation behavior in relation to variables such as clearance from the road, elevation, sign dimensions, character count, and road context. Statistical analyses included repeated-measure ANOVAs, non-parametric tests, and regression models to evaluate the impact of these factors on visual attention. Results indicated that 24% of all roadside advertising signs were fixated. Fixation rate varied significantly by category, with billboards receiving the highest proportion of fixations (31%), followed by gas price LED signs (27%), vendor signs (23%), and directional signs. Fixation rate was also significantly higher for signs located on the driver’s side of the road and was influenced by clearance from the road and the number of characters. The median fixation duration was 297 ms, which was significantly longer in rural contexts than in urban ones. Duration was negatively correlated with driving speed and elevation but positively correlated with the number of medium-sized characters. Median fixation distance was 58.10 m, varying significantly by category; gas price LED signs and billboards were fixated at greater distances than directional signs. Fixation distance was also influenced by driving speed, sign width, surface area, and character count. The findings suggest that roadside advertising signs constitute a salient source of visual distraction, with billboards and gas price displays attracting the most attention. The study highlights that sign conspicuity is driven by bottom-up processes such as saliency and effort, with larger, text-heavy signs placed closer to the road shoulder capturing more visual attention. These results imply that regulations regarding roadside advertising should consider not only billboards but also other sign types, particularly those with high visual complexity or dynamic content, to mitigate potential risks to driving safety.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| archive | success | semantic_scholar | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | pdftotext | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-26 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| enrich | success | semantic_scholar | — | — | 4 | 2026-06-26 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-19 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-26 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified_with_issues.
Topics
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- external distraction
- visual
- sign visibility legibility
- signage environment
- gaze based attention detection
- attention allocation
Information type
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- Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data