
- #COGNITIVE DEMAND OF UNDISTRACTED HIGHWAY DRIVING DRIVERS#
- #COGNITIVE DEMAND OF UNDISTRACTED HIGHWAY DRIVING DRIVER#
“However, chatty passengers tend to pose less of a risk than mobile phone conversations,” he affirmed, explaining that they will usually “moderate the conversation when road hazards arise” or pick up on non-verbal cues to ease the flow of conversation as required.
#COGNITIVE DEMAND OF UNDISTRACTED HIGHWAY DRIVING DRIVERS#
Hole said anything that causes drivers to imagine something visually, including passengers, can interfere with driving performance because the two tasks compete for similar processing resources. tion as the state when cognitive distraction contributes to a with. This led them to miss hazards in their peripheral vision, while undistracted participants’ eye movements ranged over a much wider area, added the study, which was published in the “Transportation Research” journal. between queues comprised entirely of distracted or undistracted drivers ranged from. The study, which tracked eye movements, also found that drivers who were distracted suffered from “visual tunneling,” which caused them to focus their eyes on a small central region directly ahead of them. The only ‘safe’ phone in a car is one that’s switched off.” The use of hand-held phones was made illegal primarily because they interfere with vehicle control, but Hole noted that the study “adds to a mounting body of research showing that both hand-held and hands-free phones are dangerously distracting for drivers.
#COGNITIVE DEMAND OF UNDISTRACTED HIGHWAY DRIVING DRIVER#
This visual imagery competes for processing resources with what the driver sees in front of them on the road,” he explained. Hands-free can be equally distracting because conversations cause the driver to visually imagine what they’re talking about. Even drowsy driving may also be considered a type of cognitive distraction however, it’s usually regarded as its own issue. Being under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.

All rights reserved.“Our research shows this is not the case. Some common cognitive distractions while driving may include: Thinking about something that’s upsetting. The extent to which such self-regulation fully compensates for the impact of added cognitive demand remains an open question.Ĭopyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. This suggests that in general drivers of all ages attempt to regulate their behavior in a risk reducing direction when under added cognitive demand. These distractions can be from electronic sources (such as cell phones or navigation devices) or more conventional distractions (such as interacting. Regardless of demand level, cognitive workload reduced the frequency of lane changes for all age groups. Distracted driving, as defined by NHTSA, is a specific type of inattention that occurs when drivers divert their attention away from the driving task to focus on another activity. These results could be interpreted as evidence that older adults adopt a more conservative driving style as reflected in being less likely to choose the leftmost lane than the younger groups and less likely to change lanes than drivers in their 40's. In addition, drivers in their 60's were less likely to drive on the leftmost lane compared to drivers in their 20's and 40's.

The 40's age group had 147% higher odds of exhibiting a lane change than the 60's group. Three age groups (20-29, 40-49, and 60-69) were monitored in an instrumented vehicle. This paper evaluates data from an on-road study to determine the effects of age and cognitive demand on lane choice and lane changing behavior. Consequently, it is unclear if the patterns observed in these simulation studies carry over to actual driving. The majority of studies which have evaluated lane changing behavior under cognitive workload have been conducted in driving simulators. With the increase of cognitive demand, drivers tend to concentrate their gaze in. However, lane changing behavior of different age groups under varying levels of cognitive demand is not well understood. It is especially a matter of serious discussion among the road safety. Previous research suggests that drivers change lanes less frequently during periods of heightened cognitive load.
