It’s one of the greatest dangers faced by motorcyclists: a car driver pulls out in front of an oncoming bike, and in the chaos following, says, “Sorry mate, I didn’t see you!”
Now, a study by the University of Nottingham suggests that phenomenon (known to experienced riders as SMIDSY) isn’t so much that cagers aren’t seeing riders, it’s that they’re seeing them, then forgetting them.
The study took place using a driving simulator (pictured above), and examined actions and reactions of riders at intersections. According to the university’s press release, “The research team explored where drivers looked and what they remembered while crossing junctions in a driving simulator. The big surprise from the research was the fact that some drivers have absolutely no recollection of seeing an oncoming vehicle at all even as they are about to pull out at a junction.
Their results suggest that it’s what happens in the moments between seeing an approaching vehicle and pulling out that can lead to a complete absence of memory – particularly for approaching motorcycles.”
As part of the study, the researchers examined 60 simulated intersection interactions, finding the “drivers” forgot about oncoming vehicles in 20 of those intersections. According to the researchers, 14 of those 20 vehicles were motorcycles, four were cars, and two were transport vehicles.
The university ran three separate sets of simulations in total, including one that used special glasses to track what a driver could see. In every simulation, the answer was the same: even in cases where the drivers appear to have seen oncoming vehicles, a certain percentage of those vehicles would be immediately forgotten. Far more motorcycles were forgotten when compared to cars and trucks.
As a result of the study, researchers say drivers need to work on retaining short-term memory to make safer traffic decisions, proposing something called the “Perceive Retain Choose” model. The idea is that drivers need to consciously note oncoming traffic to make better decisions; the researchers teaching drivers “if they see a motorcycle approaching, they should say so out loud – ‘See Bike, Say Bike.‘ ” Sure, it sounds goofy, but maybe it’ll help save a life, or prevent a crash?
In a scientific paper published in 1980, Nagayama and other researchers from Osaka University, found that while there was no differentiation by auto drivers of the speed of approaching motorcycles in a “cross turn” approach where the car was turning and the approaching motorcycle was intending to go straight on, they found that there was a significantly smaller “critical gap acceptance” for the motorcycles. In other words, the car drivers did not “see” the oncoming motorcycle as soon as they saw an approaching car and then allow as much distance for making the crossing turn ahead of the motorcycle.
In a Japanese scientific paper of the 1990’s, I think by the same Nagayama research team, they concluded that when approaching vehicles covered an “angle of vision” of 3 degrees or less, while the eye saw the vehicle, the human brain had historically evolved to select nervous impulses from the optic nerves to consider that narrow angle objects would be “far away”, pose no threat, and could therefore be ignored by the brain and wider angled objects, presumably being closer, and therefore potentially a more imminent threat, be concentrated upon.
The commonly prescribed gradient lens eyeglasses result in a very small “sweet spot” of clear vision and – at least in the pair I happen to have – have a narrower cone of clearly focused vision, requiring much more turning of the head from side to side while riding – or driving – in order to see the developing traffic situations. Unfortunately, many older drivers I see on the roads seem to be peering straight ahead. And younger drivers, including commercial drivers, seem to be looking at cell phones, GPS screens or ??? rather than the developing road situation.
AFJ
I wonder if the drivers who did not recall seeing the motorcycles was a result of their brain choosing not to remembering them because they were dismissed as not being a threat.
So we got SMUCKED because of SMIDSY. It happened to me in my new car years ago when someone turned left as I was going straight through an intersection on green. I was pissed while the other driver was hysterical and looked like she needed a sedative to calm her down. Her hysteria worked as I was defenseless to strike up a fight, remember that tactic if you’re at fault the next time.
“Sure, it sounds goofy, but maybe it’ll help save a life, or prevent a crash?”
Perhaps not so goofy. Pilots, for example, often use verbal work flows to ensure that they are actually seeing that which they expect to see. For example, if a pilot should be taking off on runway 22R, he/she might say something like, “I see 22R painted on the runway.” Train engineers in Japan are famous (infamous?) for such verbal work flows, too, and many a foreigner standing at the front of the first car has raised an eyebrow when hearing the engineer speaking out that work flow in a loud voice from station to station.