Washington D.C. [USA], July 28 (ANI): People who notice one traffic hazard are less likely to notice other hazards, says a recent study. The finding applies both on the driver training and the development of automated vehicle safety.The study was published in the journal -- 'Accident Analysis and Prevention.'Jing Feng, the corresponding author of the research, said: "This is a phenomenon called a subsequent search miss (SSM), which was first described in the context of doctors evaluating medical images -- their ability to spot a problem was hindered if they had already found another problem in the same image."To bring into the test, researchers conducted three studies. Each study asked participants to evaluate 100 traffic images and identify any potential hazards that would prevent them from driving in a given direction.Each image contained between zero and two hazards. Some hazards were "high-salience" targets, meaning they were glaringly obvious -- like a red sports car. Other hazards were low-salience targets such as drably dressed pedestrians.In the first study, the researchers gave 20 participants approximately one second to identify any hazards. The participants were able to detect 70 per cent of low-salience targets if they were the only hazard in the scene.But only 30 per cent of the low-salience targets were identified when there were two hazards in the scene. In other words, low-salience hazards were 40 per cent less likely to be identified when they appeared in the same scene as a high-salience hazard.In the final study, researchers gave 30 participants up to five seconds to identify any hazards -- but there was a twist. Scenes were introduced as having either high risk or low risk of containing multiple targets.Talking about the results, Robert Sall, first author of the study, said: "Here, we found that participants spent more time evaluating traffic scenes after being told the scenes were high risk. However, there was still a distinct pattern of performance that could be attributed to SSMs.""Our findings will also likely be useful for those whose work involves traffic accident diagnostics," Feng says."It's now clear that SSMs have the potential to prevent drivers from noticing important pieces of visual information, which may contribute to lapses in driving performance. A great deal of work now needs to be done to determine the scope of the problem and what we can do about it, "he concluded. (ANI)

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