Impact of Cognitive Task Complexity on Drivers’ Visual Tunneling

By Bryan Reimer. 2009

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive distractions have been shown to affect drivers adversely and are a leading cause of accidents. Research indicates that drivers alter how they allocate their visual attention while engaging in secondary cognitive tasks. To evaluate the potential impact of secondary cognitive tasks on the allocation of drivers’ visual attention and on vehicle control, drivers were presented with increasingly complex forms of an auditory cognitive task while driving an instrumented vehicle. Measures of vehicle performance and eye gaze were assessed. Consistent with theories of visual tunneling, gaze distributions were significantly smaller while drivers performed certain levels of the secondary task; peripheral vision was thereby reduced. During the most difficult level of the secondary task, gaze dispersion was smaller than during any other level of the task. Changes in visual attention may provide earlier indications of cognitive distraction than changes in vehicle control, the latter of which were observed only during the most difficult level of the secondary task. Observed changes in vertical eye position suggest that drivers compensate for moderate cognitive demands by increasing their sight distance before further incremental increases in workload exceeded their abilities. In summary, the workload of a secondary cognitive task affected drivers’ visual attention. A low to moderate increase in workload was detectable as a change in gaze before vehicle control suffered. Gaze restriction appears related to the degree of cognitive workload. This work shows that visual attention is a potential method of detecting changes in driver state associated with cognitive workload.

Subfields: Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1138eb5eb32ec53d1e5be74d71276dda7a5915f8

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Citations in the corpus

The impact of a naturalistic hands-free cellular phone task on heart rate and simulated driving performance in two age groups (2011, methodology): “…is important to consider that even low to moderately demanding cognitive tasks that do not result in overt decrements in driving performance, such as lane keeping, may still impact critical aspects of visual attention and reaction times (Recarte & Nunes, 2003; Reimer, 2009; Strayer & Drews, 2004).”
Sensitivity of Physiological Measures for Detecting Systematic Variations in Cognitive Demand From a Working Memory Task (2012, result): “As detailed in Table 3 and consistent with earlier studies (Mehler et al., 2009; Reimer, 2009), task performance varied across the periods, F(2, 210) = 28.67, p < .001, with more errors occurring during the more memory intensive versions of the n-back (pairwise p values < .002 all comparisons).”
The sensitivity of different methodologies for characterizing drivers’ gaze concentration under increased cognitive demand (2014, methodology): “Consistent with previous research, these results indicate that horizontal gaze dispersion is highly sensitive to changes in cognitive demand, while vertical gaze dispersion is not (Reimer, 2009; Reimer et al., 2010; Sodhi et al., 2002).”
Review of eye-related measures of drivers’ mental workload (2015, background): “Over the years, many parameters characterising eye fixations have been studied in relation with driver’s mental workload, including number of fixations, fixation duration, number of saccades, saccadic duration, saccadic amplitude, peak of saccadic velocity, and gaze distribution [6], [13-18].”
Ergonomics Society of the Human Factors and Human Factors: The Journal (2014, unknown): “For instance, although visual distraction tasks commonly lead to dispersed gaze patterns (NHTSA, 2012), cognitive distractions tend to cause visual tunneling (Reimer, 2009).”