Abstract
Nearly 64.7% of pedestrians killed in accidents are elder ones. However, elder people merely account for 11.5% of Taiwanese population. These disproportionate percentages rise the issue of elder pedestrians’ safety. And we think poor situation awareness (SA) maybe the cause of this tragedy. In order to deal with this, this study examines the differences of SA between younger and elder pedestrians. There were 30 younger and 30 elder participants with identical gender ratio attended to the experiment. The younger ones aged between 20 to 30 years (Mean = 23.43; SD = 1.76); elder ones were over 65 (Mean = 73.77; SD = 7.7). Each subjects had normal visual ability. Situation Awareness Rating Technique (SART) was applied to measure their subjective situation awareness while Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) was used to evaluate objective one. Elder participants report similar SART scores with younger ones. It seems that insufficient self-awareness of elderly might be the reason of this result. Elder people might not be fully aware of their age-related declines, or they don’t think these deteriorations could threaten them. However, these deficits would actually impact their safety, so their performances on SAGAT task are apparently worse than younger group. Effective visual search and attention distribution might enable younger people to scrutinize road situation, and these could be another explanation of SAGAT results. Further, correlation analysis indicates that there is no significant correlation between SART and SAGAT. Accordingly, we conclude that elder pedestrians’ inaccurate estimation of their abilities might lead to their vulnerability. Their ineffective visual search and attention distribution have them fail to observe road situations as well as younger people. Hence we suggest elderly should have health examination regularly to track health condition. We also advise extending the duration of red and green lights. This could let elder people have much time to examine road situation, and thus enhance their safety. The future study could further compare the SA between drivers’ and pedestrians’. With this, the problem of elder pedestrians’ safety could be addressed much well.