Driving is a highly complex task that requires integrating motor control of the vehicle with the demands of the visual environment. The attentional demands of this task are thus extremely high, as attention must be simultaneously deployed to controlling the vehicle itself, visual displays within the vehicle, like the speedometer, and the external driving scene, like other cars on the road, over sustained periods of time.
Moreover, most people drive while performing a host of other distracting tasks, like adjusting the radio or mediating arguing children. It should therefore come as no surprise that previous work has shown that those with better attentional function are better drivers.
In new research published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Mackenzie and Harris (2017) test whether this relationship between attention and driving is linked to more effective eye movement strategies.
Participants completed two visual attention tasks that required either visually tracking multiple objects (Multiple Object Tracking task, MOT) or moving a target item to avoid collision with multiple moving objects (Multiple Object Avoidance task, MOA).
Consistent with previous work, performance on these attention tasks was moderately correlated with driving performance, measured using a demerit-based point system in a driving simulation of three courses that varied in complexity (country highway, urban driving, motorway environment).
More importantly, performance on the MOA was positively correlated with a wider horizontal spread of visual attention during the driving, measured as the standard deviation of eye fixation locations along the horizontal axis, on the two more difficult driving courses. Moreover, better performance in the MOA was associated with faster and larger saccades within the roadway and the overall scene.
It is interesting that the MOT was not a predictor of eye movements during driving, especially given that the MOT and MOA accounted for a similar proportion of the variance in driving performance overall. The authors attribute this result to the fact that participants made fewer eye movements in the MOT than MOA, which is consistent with the fact that relying on covert attention rather than eye movements is an effective strategy in the MOT.
Together, the authors interpret these results to suggest that those with better attentional ability have more resources available to visually scan the road, particularly as road complexity increases. This may also explain differences in driving performance between experts and novices: novices may need to devote more resources to controlling the vehicle, and thus cannot engage in effective visual scanning, even if they know where to look.
Citation
- Mackenzie, A. K., & Harris, J. M. (2017). A link between attentional function, effective eye movements, and driving ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43(2), 381–394. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000297
Note: This article is in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area.