Does road familiarity change eye fixations? A comparison between watching a video and real driving

Fixation times are known to decrease after multiple exposures to the same road in simulated environments. The present study investigates whether this also holds for real driving and for watching a video, which was taped during driving (while simulating steering and braking). It appeared that the fixation times for traffic signs, information signs or road markings decreased as participants encountered the environment more often. This decrease between the two conditions in fixation times was quite comparable between watching a video and actual driving. However, there were also some differences in fixation times and frequencies to specific objects. Therefore, great care is needed when using video instead of real driving to investigate fixation times and frequencies to traffic related objects.