Visual Attention in Driving: The Effects of Cognitive Load and Visual Disruption

Abstract

Objective: This study investigates the effect of cognitive load on guidance of visual attention. Background: Previous studies have shown that cognitive load can undermine driving performance, particularly drivers' ability to detect safety-critical events. Cognitive load combined with the loss of exogenous cues, which can occur when the driver briefly glances away from the roadway, may be particularly detrimental. Method: In each of two experiments, twelve participants engaged in an auditory task while performing a change detection task. A change blindness paradigm was implemented to mask exogenous cues by periodically blanking the screen in a driving simulator while a change occurred. Performance measures included participants' sensitivity to vehicle changes and confidence in detecting them. Results: Cognitive load uniformly diminished participants' sensitivity and confidence, independent of safety relevance or lack of exogenous cues. Periodic blanking, which simulated glances away from the roadway, undermined change detection to a greater degree than did cognitive load; however, drivers' confidence in their ability to detect changes was diminished more by cognitive load than by periodic blanking. Conclusion: Cognitive load and short glances away from the road are additive in their tendency to increase the likelihood of drivers missing safety-critical events. Application: This study demonstrates the need to consider the combined consequence of cognitive load and brief glances away from the road in the design of emerging in-vehicle devices and the need to provide drivers with better feedback regarding these consequences.

Head and gaze dynamics in visual attention and context learning

“…This result is well-aligned with more recent results indicating the limitations of drivers' multitasking abilities [18]. Moreover, some suggest that visual distractions may even increase likelihood of "change blindness", a phenomena whereby a subject may look in a certain area and not see or comprehend the objects in front of them [9,17]. In these cases, it would be useful to know whether a gaze shift is attributable more to irrelevant visual stimuli or to a specific goal or context.…”

Change detection in urban and rural driving scenes: Effects of target type and safety relevance on change blindness

“…These findings suggest that changes with 513 greater safety relevance are more effective at capturing drivers' implicit attention (i.e., probability of 514 fixation) and are more likely to be consciously processed. This is consistent with previous findings 515 that observers are more efficient at changes that are more central to interpreting the scene (Rensink et 516 al., 1997) and those that have greater personal or task relevance (Galpin et al, 2009;Lee et al, 2007;on change detection accuracy in rural scenes and did not predict RT or looked-but-failed-to-see 522 errors. The only measure that was clearly affected in the expected direction was probability of 523 fixating the target, in that drivers were more likely to fixate targets with higher safety relevance.…”

Leading to distraction: Driver distraction, lead car, and road environment

“…driving/lane-keeping) which effectively 91 treats gaze concentration as a compensation mechanism (Victor et al, 2005). Conversely, Recarte 92 and Nunes (2000) argue that the gaze concentration could actually reflect the narrowing of the size 93 of the attentional focus, which could also explain the detriments in detection of peripheral targets 94 associated with non-visual distraction (Lee, et al, 2007;Merat & Jamson, 2008). 95…”