SUMMARY – with experience we tend to use more rapid ‘pre-programmed’ search patterns at intersections… these search patterns are based on prior experience and expectation… experienced drivers search for gaps at a predetermined distance from the junction… failure to search ‘backwards’ towards their vehicle can lead to detection failures when there are vehicles closer than the observed gap… the failures are rare, which leads us to believe our strategy is a good one…

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IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – our visual environment is cluttered with objects… our visual attention tends to be drawn towards the objects with which we have most connection… motorcyclists tend to spot other motorcycles… but other road users with no interest in motorcycles are less likely to see them…

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IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – ‘inattentional blindness’ does not mean that drivers are “not paying attention”… it occurs when we are tightly focused on one particularly demanding task at the expense of other, apparently less-demanding tasks… we fail to notice anything that’s not part of that immediate task…

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IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – when driving the brain needs to process sensory information… this is known as the ‘cognitive workload’… as driving tasks increase in difficulty, the workload starts to increase… even relatively simple tasks create an incoming information stream that exceeds the brain’s ability to process it all… stress in driving tasks further reduces the brain’s ability to process data… once the workload limit exceeded, a driver’s situational awareness at junctions is significantly degraded…

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IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – the way our brain scans our environment means that we can miss rare objects… only 3% of the vehicles on the road in Europe are PTWs so meeting one at a junction is actually a relatively rare event… even when drivers know there are particular vehicles around, they’ll miss the unusual ones… in experiments, drivers are even more likely to miss spotting buses than motorcycles…

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IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – the human visual system is sensitive to lateral movement across the background… but we are particularly poor at spotting things moving directly towards us… this is known as ‘motion camouflage’… motorcycles approaching a driver waiting to turn may not create any lateral movement… and the driver fails to spot the bike due to motion camouflage…

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – when we turn our heads quickly, our vision is shut down in a series of ‘saccades’… this causes ‘saccadic masking’… drivers at junctions turn their heads quickly left and right, and generate saccades… if the motorcycle falls behind a saccade, the driver can appear to look right at the bike and yet will not see it… 

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IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – we tend to assume that the eye acts like a camera but because a motorcycle is within the driver’s field of view, there’s no guarantee that the driver will actually see it… clear, colour and focused vision only occurs across a tiny zone… the vast majority of incoming visual data falls into the fuzzy, colourless peripheral vision… it’s our brains that give us the illusion of full-colour vision over a wide area… given the tiny ‘foveal zone’ the concept of  making ‘eye contact’ seems of doubtful value…

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

SUMMARY – many early studies implicated poor saliency and poor sensory conspicuity as the reason for ‘looked but failed to see’ errors… the narrow frontal shape of a motorcycle makes it harder to spot than a car… many studies have focused on finding ways of making motorcyclists ‘more conspicuous’… but despite collision statistics remain largely unchanged… this suggests that it may not be a lack of conspicuity that is the likely explanation for car drivers missing motorcycles… but it’s become accepted as fact rather than asking if the theory is actually whether the hypothesis is correct. 

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491

PAGE SUMMARY – motorcycles are small and easily hidden… the motorcycle can be concealed by the vehicle itself or by objects outside the car… the A pillars either side of the windscreen have steadily got thicker to provide better crash protection… a ‘framing effect’ means we avoid looking at the edges of the windscreen… when two vehicles are moving towards an intersection and due to arrive at the same time, the ‘bearing’ between the two vehicles stays constant… if one vehicle is hidden when the bearing remains constant, it will remain hidden… even though the rider can see the vehicle, the driver may not see the bike…

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THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

IMPORTANT:

The material is free to all to access and use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means you can share it with your family and friends, and re-use it for club magazines and websites, so long as you acknowledge the source and author and include the same Creative Commons license in the derived works.

Please note, this Creative Commons license excludes commercial use. If you wish to use any of my work for commercial purposes, including (but not limited to) articles in pay-for magazines or commercial websites, please contact me.

Kevin Williams has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Photo credit Paul Townsend https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/20001313491