Modality differences in primary and secondary performance during simulated driving.

This paper presents findings from experimental work investigating driver conflicts from multiple in-vehicle information sources. Drivers were presented with visual, auditory, and a combination of visual & auditory, secondary information, whilst undertaking a primary tracking task. Research suggests that auditory information has least effect on the primary driving task. Results from this paper do not support this hypothesis. Conducting any of the secondary tasks was found to influence the performance of the primary tracking task. However no significant differences were found between the different modalities.