Abstract: Pedestrian safety has been a worldwide safety problem, especially in developing countries like China. This paper reviewed the cognitive process of pedestrians’ road crossing behaviors: the cognitive input process of observation and perception; and the judgment and decision making processes. The former is about the content of observation, the strategies utilized, and also the situations when people get wrong perception due to deficiency in attention resources. The latter process was related to theories about the underlying mental mechanism of decision making: the Utility based theory, and the Theory of Planned Behavior. Gap Acceptance Theory was also introduced to account for pedestrian behaviors that were not controlled by signal lights, with red light running as a typical behavior that was influenced by both personal and contextual factors. Based on these findings from literature, a conceptual cognitive model for pedestrian road crossing behavior was proposed. It is expected that the model can facilitate future pedestrian crossing behavior research and improve pedestrian safety.

Key words: pedestrian, crossing behavior safety, cognitive psychology, model