ROAD ACCIDENTS STUDIED

Southland Times, Issue 25538, 5 December 1944, Page 3

ROAD ACCIDENTS STUDIED

TESTS UNDERGONE BY PEDESTRIANS A lecture on recent advances in the study of psychology in the University of Otago illustrated by moving pictures was given to the Southland branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand in the Museum last evening by Mr H. H. Ferguson, M.A., F.B.Ps.S., of the university. Miss C. McHaffie, president, introduced the speaker. Psychology dealt with behaviour and the psychologist classified behaviour under three headings, cognative, affective and conative, said Mr Ferguson. Cognative embraced perceiving, remembering, thinking, judging and believing, affective the emotion and conative, goal-seeking behaviour and problem serving. The first film shown depicted an animal’s reaction to sound allied to shock. The second film was designed to draw attention to apparent movement in inanimate objects. This was used extensively in the film industry and neon signs. The third showed the goalseeking behaviour of rats in a maze, the goal in this instance being food. PEDESTRIANS’ BELIEFS Mr Ferguson described tests which had been carried out in an effort to limit the number of road accidents in which drivers of cars were involved. The characteristics of drivers had been studied from the viewpoints of vision, co-ordination and distraction. Pedestrians’ beliefs in their visibility at night were also contributing factors. The evidence collected showed that they had strong tendencies to exaggerate grossly the degree of visibility. In many cases they did not get out of the way of a car through the belief that they could be seen. The general method of testing was to get the subjects to walk either away from, or towards, the headlights of a stationary car, and to indicate by the depositing of pegs, the points along the road at which they held certain beliefs about their visibility to the driver. When moving away from the headlights they were asked to indicate the last point at which they were absolutely certain that they were just visible. The data thus obtained indicated that an appreciable percentage of pedestrians overestimated their visibility to what might reasonably be held to be a dangerous degree. Mr Ferguson suggested that the immediate need was to educate road users regarding this source of error. Work was being undertaken with night vision, said Mr Ferguson, and experiments had been carried out to estimate the time required for the vision to adjust itself when a person left a dark room and went into a lighted room. A great deal of work had been done in this field, and tests had been carried out with various colours, red, amber, white, blue and green. A slide illustrating the time taken to recognize objects after the eyes had become used to the different colours was shown. A vote of thanks to the speaker was proposed by Mr A. J. Deaker.