This Ph.D. project aims at studying drivers' road crossing behaviour under the perspective of visually guided actions. In the introduction, we present that former studies related to road crossing behaviour mainly focused on perceptual judgement processes. However, we demonstrate that this kind of task would be better understood with theories issued from the ecological approach of perception and motor control studies. Our literature review leads us to make a bridge between the task of crossing a road inside a free moving traffic gap and the task of intercepting an horizontally moving target. In this regard, it has been demonstrated that the Constant Bearing Angle strategy (CBA) has a high explanatory power in respect to experimental data. We used driving simulation tools in order to assess the hypothesis of the use of a bearing angle based strategy by drivers. In the first experimental chapter, we show that studying perceptual-motor coupling in this task is relevant and that observed behaviour is close to which observed in horizontally moving target interception tasks. The second experimental chapter demonstrates that drivers' behaviour relies both on visual information related to the moving gap (global contribution) and that related to the independent vehicles (local contributions). In the last experimental chapter, we evidenced that drivers' behaviour does not exclusively rely on the changes of the bearing angle but also on traffic vehicles' optical expansion. We conclude on how our results shed new light on former obtained results with perceptual judgements based methodology. Finally, we suggest further researches by considering experimental manipulation of drivers' action capabilities and we also consider how our results could be used in order to design driving assistance systems.
