Drivers' mental representations of familiar rural roads

- Drivers completed picture sort and rating tasks for photographs of familiar roads.
- Road categories from picture sort showed good agreement and predicted subsequent ratings of speed, difficulty, and comfort.
- Use of familiar roads resulted in very consistent categorisations across participants.
- Drivers use road geometry rather than roadside features to differentiate roads.

The focus of the research was to investigate drivers' expectations and mental representations of familiar rural roads. Participants first completed a picture sort task for 34 rural road scenes from the local area and then rated the roads individually in terms of their comfort, driving difficulty, monotony, the speed they would choose, and how safe they would feel while driving. The similarity judgements from the picture sorting task were analysed with multi-dimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analyses to reveal six non-overlapping road categories with very good agreement across participants. These categories correctly predicted significant differences in the participants' explicit judgements about speed, difficulty, physical comfort, and safety of the individual roads. We believe that these findings can be taken as supporting evidence that these drivers' had formed underlying mental representations or schemata for these familiar roads based on the type of driving required for each.