Are child-pedestrians able to identify hazardous traffic situations? Measuring their abilities in a virtual reality environment

Background: Child-pedestrians are more prone to fail in identifying hazardous situations. Aiming to better understand the development of hazard-perception abilities in dynamic road situations we examined participants' hazard detection abilities in a virtual environment. Method: Experienced-adult participants and child-pedestrians observed typical road crossing related scenarios from a pedestrian's point of view and engaged in a hazard detection task. Results: Consistent with our hypotheses, less instances of obscured field of view by parked vehicles were reported as hazardous by 7-9-year-olds, who were also prone to linger more in identifying situations depicting field of view partially obscured by parked vehicles compared to all other age groups. Reports of obscured field of view by road curvature as hazardous increased with age. Conclusions: Understanding child-pedestrians' shortcomings in evaluating traffic situations contribute to the effort of producing intervention techniques which may increase their attentiveness toward potential hazards and lead toward reduction in their over-involvement in crashes. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.