The Hurt Report found that bright colours significantly reduced involvements in accidents.
See point 14 at http://www.clarity.net/~adam/hurt-report.html

I, for one, am wearing bright colours, even if I look severely fashion-challenged.

Mike

I purchased myself a saftey vest like this for night / bad weather riding and have found in these conditions it has helped me stand out and be seen.

ITs 2nd benefit is that it makes me look like a police officer (work cover requires them to wear a vest), so cars naturally slow down around me.



Cost me $15 AUS and I purchased it to fit over my jacket.

Quote from: 3imo on April 13, 2006, 12:30:51 PM
I say wear bright clothes until someone posts a decent reference about it.

I'd hate someone to go with black just cause they read here that it dont matter.
If its true then fine...prove it.

YAY!!!! colors

I'm going to look it up, but it follows the theory of the eye's blind spot. Bet you didnt know your brain was its own little photoshop, did you. here's an explanation of the eye's blind spot and how the brain "completes" the picture, including a little experiment you can do.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/cuius/idle/percept/blindspot.htm

I'm still looking for the exact article I read previously though, stay tuned.

"lateral inhibition in the retina"
closer to what I am talking about:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/latinhib.html

there's this famous experiment, which resulted in people not seeing a man dressed as a gorilla beating his chest (50% didnt see him!):http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssuePreview&ARTICLEID_CHAR=E7827E04-2B35-221B-6548C570D8D033D6

QuoteIn fact, 50 percent of subjects in this remarkable experiment by Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher F. Chabris of Harvard University did not see the gorilla, even when asked if they noticed anything unusual (see their paper "Gorillas in Our Midst" at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_ lab/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HA! this is the phenomenon I am referring to-INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/inattentionalblindness.html

QuoteWe see objects, not because of their absolute brightness, but by their contrast with the background. When there is higher contrast, objects are more conspicuous. For example, black cars are involved in many more accidents, presumably because they harder to notice at night. We also are more likely to notice objects which are large and which move or flicker. That's why school busses, police cars, ambulances, railroad crossings and so on all use flickering light. Recent research has shown , however, factors such as bright colors, movement and flicker do not ensure conspicuity. For example, Britain experienced a rash of accidents where drivers struck police cars parked on road shoulders. In order to reduce the accidents, the entire police car rears were painted the "highly conspicuous" chevron pattern as shown in the figure. Although the cars might now seem conspicuous, the rate of these accidents actually increased.

ALSO FROM SAME LINK:

Quote3. Expectation

Past experience exerts a strong control on attention because it teaches us what is and isn't relevant. For example, think about your breathing. You can now sense the movement of your chest. Of course, the movement was always there but you were inattentionally blind to it because it is highly uninformative. Nothing new ever happens, so attention filters away the sensation to conserve mental processing.

Expectation has a powerful effect on our ability to see and to notice. When my wife and I go to the mall, we sometimes separate to perform errands. When I go to look for her, I usually recall her coat and search for someone wearing he right color. At first, I did this unconsciously, but after I while I realized that I was adopting an attentional set on purpose. Color blobs (a coat) are far easier to scan and search than are the finer details of facial feature. This strategy usually works, but once in a while I'll have forgotten which coat she wore that day and expect to see the wrong color. On those occasions, I've walked right by her, completely blind to the other features, all highly familiar, which should have attracted attention to my wife.

Errors often occur when there is a new and unusual combination of circumstances in a highly familiar circumstance. The driver who hit the bicyclist had pulled into the same driveway every workday for a year and had never seen anyone. She had unconsciously learned that there wasn't anything important to see down the sidewalk. The submarine captain had learned that if there were no blips on the sonar, then there should be no ships in view. The nurse was used to picking out the same size and shape bottle that contained a different drug.

Thanks for the links, I like the one with the blind spot finder.  Pretty neat. 

I don't doubt any of what those papers and articles say.  But I think it may be inappropriate to take the conclusions or assertions they support and extend that to other issues they're not directly addressing.  As was previously stated, the Hurt report suggested decreased incidence of collisions for brightly dressed riders.  If the research in those links was 100% relevant to our problem this would not be the case, right?

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but consider camoflage.  Our soldiers (or hunters and ninjas for that matter) wear it so they blend in with their surroundings, making them less noticeable.  The opposite, that if you stand out from your surroundings you are more noticeable, has to be true.  This explains the weird bright orange hunters use - to animals it doesn't look so bright, but to other hunters it does!  Therefore, riding with your headlight on and wearing bright clothes should make you more noticeable, and therefore less likely to be hit. 

I think these articles talk to the reasons we can still be hit, regardless of what we're wearing or doing, but I'm not sure they point to a conclusion that bright gear won't help.

jeff

Quote
Errors often occur when there is a new and unusual combination of circumstances in a highly familiar circumstance. The driver who hit the bicyclist had pulled into the same driveway every workday for a year and had never seen anyone. She had unconsciously learned that there wasn't anything important to see down the sidewalk. The submarine captain had learned that if there were no blips on the sonar, then there should be no ships in view. The nurse was used to picking out the same size and shape bottle that contained a different drug.

Let me toot my horn again against installing loud horns on a motorcycle.  Put in a big horn might scare the crap out of the dozing grandma, but she will look out for a big truck and miss a tiny motorcycle.  The only solution is to ride defensively, which is the price we all pay for being motorcyclists.

Cheers,
e.

Thanks Pablo, I will share this with my Motorcycle buddys around town.

although I think Jeff is 100% right, it's still a good thing to know and consider on the road.

Quote from: Jeff P on April 14, 2006, 04:03:21 AM
I think these articles talk to the reasons we can still be hit, regardless of what we're wearing or doing, but I'm not sure they point to a conclusion that bright gear won't help.

jeff

The articles don't really conclude bright colours make you less likely to be seen.

Just that normal driver behaviour usually results in drivers going into autopilot and not changing their driving style, like checking their mirrors just that little bit more before changing lanes, or looking left/right and actually being prepared to stop at intersections.

I know as a car driver, I used to make an effort to look right down a low traffic road before pulling out, but the one time a car was actually coming the other way (after months on months of never seeing a car) I realised that even though I looked right, I was not actually expecting to stop. My late reaction time meant there could have been an accident if I hadn't seen the other car until a fraction of a second later.

If the bright clothing allows you to be seen 100th of a second earlier by drivers, thats a big  in my book.

Regarding camouflage - I think it is more important to wear a solid color, thus appearing as a larger more singular object, than multiple colors that break up against a background like camouflage.  A solid white, or black, helmet; all black leathers...