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Although great progress has been made to improve the safety and performance of autonomous vehicles with the ultimate goal of meeting the public expectation of preventing most accidents, the current fleet of autonomous vehicles being tested continues to demonstrate that we still remain distant from that holy grail. One rationalization for some of these accidents has been that different maneuvers performed by such cars are not human-like (i.e. they do not display certain driving patterns to which human drivers are accustomed to). With that in mind, it would be hard to dispute the need for such vehicles to adapt to and somewhat imitate human driving in order to gradually integrate human-driven traffic in the future.

Despite public expectations that autonomous vehicles should be able to avoid most accidents, the existing fleet of autonomous test vehicles has demonstrated this is simply not the case. An explanation for some of these accidents has been that these vehicles do not drive like humans and therefore do not exhibit certain driving patterns expected by human drivers. With the high likelihood of a gradual integration of autonomous vehicles into our traffic system in the future, there will be a need for such vehicles to adapt to, and mimic, human driving. Although much work has been done to understand human behavior and performance in driving, it has been mostly geared towards defining human capabilities and limitations. Little work has been done on the interactions between human-driven and autonomous vehicles.

Vision plays a key role in the safe and proper operation of vehicles. To safely navigate, drivers constantly scan their environments, which includes attending to the outside environment as well as the inside of the driver compartment. For example, a driver may monitor various instruments and road signage to ensure that they are traveling at an appropriate speed. Although there has been work done on naturalistic driver gaze behavior, little is known about what information drivers glean while driving. Here, we present a methodology that has been used to build a database that seeks to provide a framework to supply answers to various ongoing questions regarding gaze and driver behavior. We discuss the simultaneous recording of eye-tracking, head rotation kinematics, and vehicle dynamics during naturalistic driving in order to examine driver behavior with a particular focus on how this correlates with gaze behavior.