Effects of hazard type on the hazard perceptions of violation-involved and violation-free drivers: An ERP study

Hazard perception, which is closely related to crash risk, is the ability to anticipate potential dangers on the road. This study aimed to investigate the effects of drivers' previous traffic violation history on their neural processing of hazard perception under different hazard types. A mixed experimental design was employed, involving two groups of drivers (driver group: violation-involved, violation-free) and three types of images (no-hazard image, covert hazard image, overt hazard image). Twenty covert hazard images, 20 overt hazard images and 40 no-hazard images were randomly presented to 19 drivers with previous violation histories and 28 drivers without violations. The participants were asked to detect whether there was a hazardous situation in the images and press the keyboard quickly after detecting one. Response time, response accuracy and changes in the N1 (100–140 ms), N2 (250–300 ms) and P300 (300–400 ms) components of event-related potentials (ERP) were obtained and analysed. The response time to the covert hazard images was significantly greater than that to the no-hazard and overt hazard images, and the lower accuracy also revealed that the covert hazard images were harder to detect than the no-hazard and overt hazard images. Under both overt and covert hazard images, the response time of violation-involved drivers was longer, and their accuracy was worse than that of violation-free drivers. The N1 latency of violation-involved drivers was significantly longer than that of violation-free drivers. The amplitude of N2 was significantly larger in the no-hazard image than in the covert and overt hazard images. The P300 amplitude was significantly greater in the overt hazard images than in the covert and no-hazard images. Violation-involved drivers have poorer hazard perception abilities than violation-free drivers regardless of hazard type. N1 latency can differ from that of drivers with and without previous violations. These findings provide support for the development of hazard perception training systems for drivers who are prone to traffic violations.