The Visual Behavior of Recreational Boat Operators and its Relationship to Boat collisions.

Abstract : A 22-foot boat was instrumented to provide closed-circuit TV recording capabilities of head and eye movements. Four experienced boaters operated the test vehicle at low and high levels of: fatigue, velocity, and traffic density. The visual characteristic variables derived included: means and standard deviations by degrees of horizontal and vertical eye fixations; the percentage time spent in visual zones; the percent time spent looking at different objects (i.e., other boats); and eye fixation durations. At the higher fatigue level, subjects spent less time looking at the instrument panel and lowered their fixation pattern from above to below the horizon. Low fatigue did not affect the dispersion of the horizontal looking fixations as traffic density increased, but the high fatigue affected this dispersion at both low and high density levels.