Looking for an out: Affordances, uncertainty and collision avoidance behavior of human drivers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Johnson, Leif, Engström, Johan, Srinivasan, Aravinda, Özturk, Ibrahim, Markkula, Gustav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866918186703650816
author Johnson, Leif
Engström, Johan
Srinivasan, Aravinda
Özturk, Ibrahim
Markkula, Gustav
author_facet Johnson, Leif
Engström, Johan
Srinivasan, Aravinda
Özturk, Ibrahim
Markkula, Gustav
contents Understanding collision avoidance behavior is of key importance in traffic safety research and for designing and evaluating advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. While existing experimental work has primarily focused on response timing in traffic conflicts, the goal of the present study was to gain a better understanding of human evasive maneuver decisions and execution in collision avoidance scenarios. To this end, we designed a driving simulator study where participants were exposed to one of three surprising opposite direction lateral incursion (ODLI) scenario variants. The results demonstrated that both the participants' collision avoidance behavior patterns and the collision outcome was strongly determined by the scenario kinematics and, more specifically, by the uncertainty associated with the oncoming vehicle's future trajectory. We discuss pitfalls related to hindsight bias when judging the quality of evasive maneuvers in uncertain situations and suggest that the availability of escape paths in collision avoidance scenarios can be usefully understood based on the notion of affordances, and further demonstrate how such affordances can be operationalized in terms of reachable sets. We conclude by discussing how these results can be used to inform computational models of collision avoidance behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Looking for an out: Affordances, uncertainty and collision avoidance behavior of human drivers
Johnson, Leif
Engström, Johan
Srinivasan, Aravinda
Özturk, Ibrahim
Markkula, Gustav
Human-Computer Interaction
Understanding collision avoidance behavior is of key importance in traffic safety research and for designing and evaluating advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. While existing experimental work has primarily focused on response timing in traffic conflicts, the goal of the present study was to gain a better understanding of human evasive maneuver decisions and execution in collision avoidance scenarios. To this end, we designed a driving simulator study where participants were exposed to one of three surprising opposite direction lateral incursion (ODLI) scenario variants. The results demonstrated that both the participants' collision avoidance behavior patterns and the collision outcome was strongly determined by the scenario kinematics and, more specifically, by the uncertainty associated with the oncoming vehicle's future trajectory. We discuss pitfalls related to hindsight bias when judging the quality of evasive maneuvers in uncertain situations and suggest that the availability of escape paths in collision avoidance scenarios can be usefully understood based on the notion of affordances, and further demonstrate how such affordances can be operationalized in terms of reachable sets. We conclude by discussing how these results can be used to inform computational models of collision avoidance behavior.
title Looking for an out: Affordances, uncertainty and collision avoidance behavior of human drivers
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14842