The Impact of Auditory Traffic Perception on Pedestrians’ Street-Crossing Behavior: Insights from Real and Virtual Environments

Abstract Does the ability to perceive an approaching vehicle through auditory cues influence a pedestrian's crossing decision? This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing literature, followed by a report on a new experiment that examined the street-crossing behaviors of thirty participants on a one-way street. Half of the participants had access to both visual and auditory perception, while the other half relied solely on visual perception. All participants completed the experiment in both a real street setting and a virtual environment. The real-environment setting offered a high degree of face validity, while the virtual environment ensured precise repeatability of the scenarios. In both settings, participants without auditory perception exhibited significantly riskier crossing behavior, accepting gaps to approaching vehicles that were approximately 10% smaller than those accepted by the group with auditory perception. The experiment also revealed that participants exhibited significantly riskier crossing behavior in the virtual environment compared to the real street.