Validity of Using a Driving Game Simulator to Study the Visual Attention Differences in Young and Older Adults

Prior research has identified that visual behavior patterns differ between older adults and the youngest, affecting their driving performance. The lack of intelligent sensing technologies to conduct such research motivated us to develop the Intelligent Multimodal Monitoring System to Infer Points of Visual Attention (SiMIPAV). It infers five classes of visual points of attention (VPoA) from the movements of the driver’s head with 98% accuracy. It also includes components to measure properties of visual attention as a function of head posture, i.e., duration and frequency of looking at specific points in the car’s cockpit). The present study aims to validate the feasibility of measuring visual behaviors with SiMIPAV using a driving simulator, which would facilitate further studies in a safe environment. Through a between-subjects study, we compared the visual behavior properties of 27 young adults (YA) aged 21–31 years and 20 older adults (OA) aged 59–74 years who participated in the naturalistic condition (YA = 15; OA = 15) or the simulation condition (YA = 12; OA = 5). We found that the frequency of looking at the road negatively correlates with driving velocity in both conditions. However, road gaze duration and speed are only correlated in the naturalistic condition. In addition, in the simulator, the younger group exhibited more risky behavior than older adults, looking less frequently at VPoAs critical to driving (i.e., rearview mirrors) and having longer gaze durations to all VPoA than in naturalistic driving.