fungus wrote:If not the mobile phone convesation, then what?
The minibus had hazard warning lights flashing and the judge said that he should have been able to see the the stopped minibus for 9-11 seconds, which at a limited maximum speed of 56mph means that he travelled between 711 and 869ft without noticing the minibus. .
'Looming' might hold part of the answer. At long distance an object will remain a fairly constant 'dot in the distance', only popping out when much closer.
Also, expectation is that a vehicle ahead will be moving. Sussex Uni did research on this which led to the police adopting 'eschelon' parking (ie fend), which gives both a wider target (sic) which looks sooner and a visual cue (vehicles rarely travel sideways along a motorway).
TheInsanity1234 wrote:The only way I can imagine the driver to have managed to miss the minibus for that length of time would be because he was looking at the phone or fiddling with a satnav while carrying on the conversation...
One answer might be inattentional blindness. Wiki says:
Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is a psychological lack of attention that is not associated with any vision defects or deficits. It may be further defined as the event in which an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight. When it simply becomes impossible for one to attend to all the stimuli in a given situation, a temporary blindness effect can take place as a result; that is, individuals fail to see objects or stimuli that are unexpected and quite often salient.
So put the two together: driver not expecting to see parked vehicles ahead + driver distracted so not putting full attention on the road ahead, so seeing what he expects to see.
Your 'standard' is how you drive alone, not how you drive during a test.