Factors Affecting Glance Behavior when Interacting with In-Vehicle Devices: Implications from a Simulator Study

This study examined the effects of text entry and reading on drivers’ eye glance behavior, as influenced by text length and presence of ambient text (i.e., text around targeted text). A simulator study was conducted with 28 drivers. The findings showed that text entry tasks required longer eyes-off-road (EOR) time than text reading tasks. The presence of ambient text also increased the total EOR time for text reading. Tasks with shorter text required shorter individual glances, but even the shortest text entry tasks resulted in long glances for those who entered text in large chunks. Thus, shortening the text length alone may not ensure safe glance behavior and other countermeasures may need to be considered.