Driving And Cognition

Cars, Calls, and Cognition: Investigating Driving and Divided Attention
Shamsi T. Iqbal, Yun-Cheng Ju, and Eric Horvitz Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 {shamsi, yuncj, horvitz}@microsoft.com
ABSTRACT

Conversing on cell phones while driving an automobile is a common practice. We examine the interference of the cognitive load of conversational dialog with driving tasks, with the goal of identifying better and worse times for conversations during driving. We present results from a controlled study involving 18 users using a driving simulator. The driving complexity and conversation type were manipulated in the study, and performance was measured for factors related to both the primary driving task and secondary conversation
Brumby et al. investigated how interleaving a phone dialing task with driving impacted lane keeping and the dialing time under conditions of requests to prioritize either driving or dialing [10]. Results showed that when asked to prioritize the secondary task, drivers chunk components of the secondary task and switch back to driving at chunk boundaries to maintain driving performance, and while focusing on driving, the secondary task is slowed down. In a related study, Brumby et al. showed that the fastest strategy for selecting a song on a music player while driving was to scroll in one contiguous block without returning attention to the primary task of driving. For the safest strategy, more time needs to be given to the driving task, at the cost of longer response times for the secondary task, and correspondingly longer stretches of times for the dual-task scenario [11]. The prior work suggests that, for automatized tasks like driving, it may be possible to formulate strategies to perform other tasks without significantly compromising driving. Successful dual-task scenarios will depend on the availability and requirements of cognitive resources for the secondary task in light of resource consumption by the primary task and opportunities for interleaving the two tasks. We explore performance in these scenarios by generating
They were then given an overview of the study. The experimenter then gave a demonstration of the controls of the driving simulator and the participant was provided with 10 minutes of practice driving to become accustomed to the system. Participants were also interrupted with practice phone calls during the practice session. Participants were then started with the study. To provide baseline data, users first performed only the phone tasks, without driving. They then went through a route of driving, without any phone interruptions. Participants then drove 3 routes where for each route they received 9 phone interruptions, 3 for each phone call