Beware big noses
New research shows why we should move side to side when approaching junctions
New eye-tracking research has proven right what many wily old riders have always said: lateral movement when approaching junctions helps car drivers notice you. The study done by Bournemouth PHD researcher Shel Silva in conjunction with the Docbike road safety charity, used eye-tracking equipment to see where drivers and riders looked when watching onboard videos. Shel revealed there are multiple ways in which drivers could not see bikes. One of the most shocking is called saccadic masking. ‘If you look from one point to another, the brain has already taken a picture of the visual environment from the first point and then overlays it while you’re moving your eyes,’ says Shel. ‘It does this to stop you getting dizzy. The problem is that if you’re a car driver at a T-junction, you’re scanning left and right really quickly across a very wide scan path so for the majority of that 180-degree arc, you’re blind.
‘You’re better off slowing down, and really focusing on the lanes you need to look at, but that’s difficult to say to someone who’s got two screaming kids in the back and is late for work. I hate to make excuses for car drivers, but we need to understand that we’ve got physiological and evolutionary reasons why we don’t see things. We’ve got a stone aged brain in a very fast, technological world it wasn’t designed for. However, if we motorcyclists move laterally across the lane as we approach the junction it can trigger a visual orienting reflex that comes from the peripheral vision, which picks up movement really well, but not detail. But that’s all it needs to do because it orients the detailed part of the vision to the bike. That means you won’t be masked.’
Lateral movement has other advantages, says Shel: ‘It potentially moves you out from behind the car’s A-pillar and if the car driver has a big nose it could obscure their vision from one eye.’
‘We’ve got physiological and evolutionary reasons why we don’t see things’