The impact of cellular phone conversations on visual attention when driving have primarily focused on attention to stimuli that are not relevant to driving. A driving simulator and eye tracking are used in this article to examine attention allocation across driving-relevant and driving-irrelevant items in the environment depending on whether drivers were distracted. The article discusses how performance measures indicate that distraction negatively impacted vehicle control. Driving relevance and the presence of distraction did not interact and this suggests that participants responded to potential hazards similarly in driving-only and distraction conditions and eye movement results indicated an interaction between distraction and relevance. Drivers attended more to driving-relevant objects, compared with less relevant items and these objects showed smaller decrements in number of gazes in the distraction condition. The article discusses how experienced drivers continue to attend to potential hazards, allocating less attention to billboards and roadway signage even under distraction conditions. (Author/publisher)
Abstract