Visual search data are important measures to be used in assessing the impact of informatic devices. The metrics of glance, glance duration and glance frequency have been found to be particularly useful. Precisely how a glance is defined can vary between studies and is sometimes taken as a crude decision of the driver looking away from the road ahead and towards the instrumentation. Such an approach can severely overestimate the actual time spent visually attending to the particular display in question. It may be that the resultant glance data actually conceals more important fine detailed information. Visual search of a particular display (in terms of fixation location, fixation series, scan paths etc.) is little used or ignored largely because of difficulties in reliably recording such information rather than such information being of little use. Better monitoring of drivers' search is therefore called for.
Abstract