Models of Attention, Distraction, and Highway Hazard Avoidance

Driver distraction (DD) is characterized by the diversion of attention away from the driving task in favor of a secondary activity (e.g., cell phone conversations). Clearly, DD constitutes a major highway safety problem. The safety issue of DD can be aligned fairly closely with the failure to respond to unexpected hazards in the roadway. Thus, this book chapter focuses on the successes and failures of noticing and attending to critical discrete hazards and events, in the multitask scenario, that are characteristic of much of driving. It may be argued that the major component of the failure to respond to these events is the initial failure to notice them in a timely fashion. Two psychological phenomena (inattentional blindness and change blindness) and one selective attentional model are described that, collectively, underlie the success and failure of noticing events in the traffic environment. It is then considered how this attentional model, along with models of multiple resources, belongs to a class of models that can underlie proposed solutions for the distracted driver.