Parking Manoeuvres Differ among Drivers with Narrower and Wider Field of View in the Presence of a Spatial Reference EVGUENI DOUISSEMBEKOV 1,4 *, JORDAN NAVARRO 2 , GEORGE A. MICHAEL 2 , PATRICK BONHOURE 3 , CATHERINE GABAUDE 4 and JOCELINE ROGÉ 4 1 Université de Lyon, Lyon, France 2 Département de Psychologie Cognitive & Neuropsychologie, Institut de Psychologie, Laboratoire d’Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Université Lyon 2, Bron Cedex, France 3 User Experience - —CDA Business Group Research, VALEO, Annemasse, France 4 IFSTTAR-TS2-LESCOT, Bron, France Summary: Parking manoeuvring was studied in a driving simulator. Younger and older participants were classified according to the extent of their visual and attentional fields of view. The manoeuvres were made either in the presence of a spatial reference on the adjacent pavement (a pedestrian or a parking meter) or with no reference. It was found that the length of manoeuvres varied only among younger drivers depending on the type of spatial reference and the extent of their visual and attentional fields. The participants with wider fields took advantage of the presence of a pedestrian or a parking meter, whereas those with a narrower field of view did not. Furthermore, the individuals with a narrower field of view were disturbed by the presence of a pedestrian on the pavement. This study provides new information to consider in relation to the safety of manoeuvring among drivers with differ- ent visual and attentional capacities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTION The ability of drivers to search for and process visual infor- mation is particularly important in the context of parking manoeuvring. During manoeuvres, especially in the case of reversing, the driver must considerably expand his or her visual search and also remain attentive so as to anticipate any unexpected event. In such conditions, drivers with visual, psychomotor and cognitive problems may encounter greater difficulty while manoeuvring. For example, artificial restriction of the field of view is known to increase the diffi- culty of manoeuvring (Wood, Dique, & Troutbeck, 1993; Wood & Troutbeck, 1994). Moreover, drivers with severe binocular field loss have significantly higher accident and violation rates than those with intact visual field (Johnson & Keltner, 1983). Numerous studies have shown that such age-related changes may impair the driving activity of older people (Clark & Demer, 2002; Eby, Trombley, Molnar, & Shope, 1998; Janke, 1994), but their parking behaviour could also be affected. Indeed, older drivers often fail to check back over the shoulder (Di Stefano & Macdonald, 2003), are aware of this difficulty (Herriots, 2005) and show compensatory behaviour by avoiding parallel parking (Baldock, Mathias, McLean, & Berndt, 2006; Douissembekov et al., in press). However, studies centred on behaviour during parking manoeuvres in the natural envi- ronment are still rare, especially among older drivers. Driver behaviour can be influenced by elements or per- sons present in the parking environment. In a recent study of the impact of visual searching on parking manoeuvring (Douissembekov et al., in press), we showed that the pres- ence of a pedestrian alongside the parking space disturbed parallel manoeuvres among older participants, but not among younger ones. Moreover, this effect depended on the horizontal extent of their field of view. When the pe- destrian was on the pavement, participants with a narrower field of view had more difficulty than participants with a larger field of view. This effect was observed for the length of parallel manoeuvres and the number of trajectory adjust- ments. A similar pattern was also seen for manoeuvre du- ration. A possible explanation is that decreased availability of visual information, because of the restricted field of view, could lead to greater difficulty in checking the posi- tion and possible movements of the pedestrian while parking. As for drivers with a wider field of view, they could use the pedestrian as a vertical point of reference to help them park. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we carried out a second study with two different types of reference points on the pavement adjacent to the parking space. We wanted to know whether the type of reference (a person vs an object) would influence manoeuvring. In fact, a pedestrian should require greater attention than an object because he or she could move through the parking space. To avoid the risk of accident, we carried out this study in a driving simulator. The goal was to investigate whether manoeuvring varies among younger and older drivers with different extents of field of view. Furthermore, we investigated whether the at- tentional component determines the quality of manoeuvring in addition to the driver’s visual capacities. In contrast to younger drivers, it is expected that older participants with a wider field of view use spatial references available in close proximity to improve their performance. Moreover, manoeuvring difficulties among older drivers with a narrower field of view, when compared with those with a wider field of view, should be greater in the presence of a pedestrian, who requires greater attention than a parking meter. *Correspondence to: Evgueni Douissembekov, IFSTTAR-TS2-LESCOT, 25 avenue F. Mitterrand, 69675 Bron Cedex, France. E-mail: evgueni.douissembekov@ifsttar.fr Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 29: 309–313 (2015) Published online 24 January 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.3110