Repeated Exposure to Identical Motorcycle Simulator Routes: Changes in Visual Attention and Riding Performance

Traffic crashes remain a major transportation safety problem, particularly for motorcycle riders, who have limited physical protection and high exposure to road hazards. Powered two-wheeler riders account for roughly a fifth of global road deaths, and the burden is concentrated in South-East Asia, where motorcycles dominate daily mobility. Although hazard perception is a trainable skill, the most recent meta-analytic synthesis of hazard perception training reports only three intervention studies with motorcyclists and the smallest pooled effect of any road-user group, indicating that rider-specific evidence is scarce. This study examined changes in motorcycle riders’ visual attention and riding performance following repeated exposure to identical Honda Riding Trainer (HRT) routes. A within-subject experiment was conducted with 20 licensed riders with 1–3 years of riding experience. Each participant completed two sessions separated by one week. In each session, participants rode five HRT routes containing 34 hazard events while their eye movements were recorded with an eye tracker. Visual attention was indexed by Time to First Fixation (TTFF), First Fixation Duration (FFD), and fixation count (FC); riding performance was indexed by driving score, total crashes, and total wrong lanes. To evaluate the effect of repeated exposure, before–after differences were compared with the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test, and the unaggregated data were then re-analyzed with mixed-effects models carrying crossed random effects for participant and for hazard. Spearman rank correlation was applied as an exploratory analysis of the associations between visual attention and riding performance measures. All six variables differed significantly between the two sessions, with large effect sizes throughout (r = 0.564–0.868). Visual attention metrics improved, with TTFF decreasing by 32.52%, FFD by 41.47%, and FC by 29.00%. Riders therefore detected hazards faster, processed them more efficiently, and required fewer fixations after prior exposure. Riding performance variables improved in parallel, where driving score increased by 7.53%, total crashes decreased by 26.32%, and total wrong lanes decreased by 61.84%. Improvement was largest for turning or crossing vehicle hazards and smallest for blind spot hazards, consistent with evidence that riders respond more slowly to gradual-onset hazards. Exploratory correlations linked driving score to crash frequency in both sessions. Repeated HRT exposure thus appears to support implicit learning of hazard anticipation, whereas latent, blind spot hazards may require explicitly targeted training.