Steering Through Curves: The Eyes Have It

When we encounter curves in the road when we’re driving, our ability to handle the wheel isn’t the fundamental key to navigating through the bend.

Recent research provided key insights on the critical role that our eyes play when we steer through road curves. The study by psychological scientist Otto Lappi of the University of Helsinki shows that tiny eye movements allow drivers to predict a vehicle’s trajectory in a curve.

Lappi and his research group used new and innovative methods to analyze the small and subtle eye movements that drivers make when driving through a curve. These optokinetic eye movements take only fractions of a second, and the driver is not aware of them.

The results, reported last year in the Journal of Vision, are based on revolutionary eye movement analysis methods developed by the University of Helsinki’s Traffic Research Unit. Exact and reliable eye movement tracking during normal driving has been possible since the 1990s. However, the computational modeling methods for behavior in a natural environment have only in recent years developed to a level which enables the testing of the different theoretical models of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying eye movements and steering in real driving environments.

Even though the behavior and physiology associated with driving have been studied for nearly a century, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. This study has provided new information on visual control in curve driving, and opened new ways to analyse the fundamental processes underlying the control of motion in natural environments.