Children’s ability to estimate approaching vehicle time-to-arrival following training in a virtual pedestrian environment

Abstract

Objectives

Child pedestrian injuries represent a significant public health challenge. Understanding the most complex cognitive skills required to cross streets helps us understand, improve, and protect children in traffic, as underdeveloped cognitive skill likely impacts children’s pedestrian safety. One complex component of street-crossing is the cognitive-perceptual task of judging time-to-arrival of oncoming traffic. We examined capacity of 7- and 8-year-olds to judge time-to-arrival for vehicles approaching from varying distances and speeds, as well as improvement in those judgments following intensive street-crossing training in a virtual reality (VR) pedestrian simulator.

Methods

500 seven- and eight-year-olds participated in a randomized trial evaluating use of a large kiosk VR versus smartphone-based VR headset to teach street-crossing skills. Prior to randomization into VR training condition and also prior to initiation of any training, children engaged in a video-based vehicle approach estimation task to assess ability to judge traffic time-to-arrival. They then engaged in multiple VR-based pedestrian safety training sessions in their randomly assigned condition until achieving adult functioning. Soon after training and again 6 months later, children repeated the vehicle estimation task.

Results

Prior to randomization or training, children were more accurate judging time to arrival for closer versus farther traffic, and rapidly-moving versus slower-moving traffic, but those results were subsumed by a speed x distance interaction. The interaction suggested distance cues were used more prominently than speed cues, and speed had varying effects at different distances. Training group had minimal effect on learning and all children became significantly better at judging vehicle arrival times following training.

Conclusions

Children tend to underestimate vehicle arrival times. Distance cues are more impactful on time-to-arrival judgments than speed cues, but children’s estimations based both on manipulations of vehicle speed and manipulations of vehicle distance improved post-training. Improvements were retained six months later. This finding is consistent with psychophysics research suggesting vehicle approach judgments rely on optical size and looming, which are impacted both by vehicle speeds and distances. Implementation of VR-based training for child pedestrian safety is recommended, as it may improve children’s judgment of vehicle time-to-arrival, but it must be conducted cautiously to avoid iatrogenic effects.

Keywords:

• Pedestrian
• safety
• affordances
• judgment
• vehicle speed
• vehicle distance

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the UAB Youth Safety Lab team for their effort in collecting, coding and cleaning data, and Joan Severson, Yefei He, Heath Kehoe, and the Digital Artefacts team for their effort to create and support the virtual reality systems.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Anonymized data will be shared with qualified users upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD088415. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.