Free, Downloadable Training Program Helps Teen Drivers Anticipate And Avoid Crashes

The program was developed by the Human Performance Laboratory at UMass Amherst by a team headed by Donald Fisher, director of the lab and a professor in the mechanical and industrial engineering department. Fisher and his team are making the program available to the public and are now working with a major insurance company on an updated version. 

“Now we know, based on our studies and other studies, that novice drivers are not anticipating hazards, they are not looking at places in the road where there is a potential threat,” says Fisher. “And the other thing we see through research is that attention is also a big problem. For instance, we find that newly licensed drivers will spend much longer looking away from the road ahead than experienced drivers. Text messaging and I-Pods are two of the big culprits here.”

Fisher says the RAPT program was created based on an analysis of police crash reports that indicate new drivers tend to lack three basic skills necessary for avoiding crashes: hazard anticipation, attention maintenance and hazard avoidance. Hazard anticipation has to do with knowing where to look for dangers; attention maintenance with concentrating on the road ahead; and hazard avoidance with special driving techniques such as skid control. So far, the Human Performance Laboratory has focused its research on the first of these three skills and is just beginning to study the second. The ongoing research is supported by a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to Fisher and his co-investigator Alexander Pollatsek of the psychology department.

“When kids are 16 or 17, they really don’t know what to look for in the way of hazards,” says Jeff Muttart, a graduate student in the Human Performance Laboratory. “They don’t know where to look. In effect, they’re playing a brand new video game with a 3,000-pound weapon, and it’s scary to realize the consequences.”

RAPT is run on a personal computer with no special accessories and was created largely by the efforts of Anuj Pradhan, a doctoral student in the Human Performance Laboratory. The work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Link Foundation for Simulation and Training, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the National Institutes of Health and a number of others. RAPT was primarily evaluated on specialized equipment in the laboratory, where driving can be recreated with a true-to-life driving simulator, one of 20 similar ones around the world.

The vehicle for the simulator is an actual Saturn sedan, which the driver operates as if it’s actually on the road. The road ahead is displayed on three screens, one in front of the car and one on each side. As the driver turns the wheel, brakes or accelerates, the roadway visible to the driver changes appropriately. The system also provides realistic road, wind and vehicle noises.

The lab also uses an eye-tracking device that looks like a pair of glasses mounted with two tiny cameras. What the eye-tracker does is provide a real time video record of the driver’s whole field of vision and the objects within that field where the driver is focusing.

“We can bring novice drivers to the point where they are as good at recognizing hazards as experienced drivers by training them in the laboratory on a PC, then evaluating their performance in our simulator,” says Fisher. “Not only do we test their performance in the simulator, but then we take them out on the road. The test results confirm that those novice drivers trained on our training program anticipate hazards on the scenarios that were evaluated as well as veteran drivers.”

The program is available by going to http://www.ecs.umass.edu/hpl and clicking on “younger drivers.”