Predicting the effects of cell-phone dialing on driver performance.

This chapter demonstrates how cognitive modelling can aid in understanding the effects of cell phone use on driver behaviour by predicting the impact of cell-phone dialling in a naturalistic driving task. The authors developed models of 4 methods of cell-phone dialling and integrated these models with an existing driver model of steering and speed control. By running this integrated model, a priori predictions were generated for how each dialling method affects the accuracy of steering and speed control with respect to an accelerating and braking lead vehicle. The model predicted that the largest effects on driver performance arose for dialling methods with high visual demand rather than methods with long dialling times. Several of the model's predictions were validated with an empirical study investigating the driving simulator performance of 7 18-40 years old licensed subjects. (Author/publisher)