Situation awareness and workload in driving while using adaptive cruise control and a cell phone

Drivers’ Reliance on Lane-Keeping Assistance Systems as a Function of the Level of Assistance

“…Level 3 (anticipation) queries required participants to project times to certain events (e.g., the time to the next turn etc.). Ma and Kaber (2005) found that driving with ACC reduced drivers' mental workload compared to driving without ACC and that SA accordingly increased across all three levels. This result was interpreted in the way that the ACC decreased demands associated with continuous speed and headway control and therefore allowed drivers to invest more resources in the maintenance of SA.…”

“…Thus, automation may lead to higher levels of SA by reducing mental workload and enabling the operator to invest more cognitive resources in the maintenance of SA. Empirical evidence for the beneficial effect of automation on SA was for example found in a study by Ma and Kaber (2005) who studied the effects of driving with an ACC system and concurrent cell-phone use on drivers' mental workload and SA. A product-oriented, memory-based measure of SA (SAGAT -Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique; Endsley, 1995a) was used in order to assess participants' responses to queries referring to Endsley's three levels of SA after freezing the simulation.…”

“…In previous studies, mostly knowledge-based measures were used in order to assess changes in drivers' SA when driving with different driver assistance systems (Ma & Kaber, 2005;Ma & Kaber, 2007;Stanton & Young, 2005). However, knowledgebased measures of SA such as SAGAT (Endsley, 1995a(Endsley, , 2000a are criticised for relying too heavily on memory and for assessing operators' recall performance after an interruption rather than their SA (Durso & Gronlund, 1999).…”

“…There are indeed a number of studies that show that automation can reduce mental workload (e.g., De Waard et al, 1999;Harris, Hancock, Arthur, & Caird, 1995;Hoedemaeker & Brookhuis, 1998;Ma & Kaber, 2005;Masalonis, Duley, & Parasuraman, 1999;Stanton & Young, 2005;M. S. Young & Stanton, 1997).…”

Characterizing the Effect of Videophone Conversations on Intersection Driving Performance

“…Cell phone conversations slow drivers' response times to unexpected events (Horrey & Wickens, 2006), reduce lateral vehicle control (Drews et al, 2008), and impair situational awareness (Ma & Kaber, 2005). Conversations impair driving performance when they divert a driver's limited attentional resources from the driving task.…”