The Musical Road: Interacting with a Portable Music Player in the City and on the Highway

It is well established that driving while interacting with a secondary in-car device, such as a portable music player, is distracting and can lead to a decline in driver safety and performance. One aspect that has not received as much attention though is the extent to which drivers adapt their interactions with an in-car device to the changing demands of the road. Do drivers adopt compensatory strategies or tactics when driving in more demanding settings? We investigate this question by conducting a driving simulator study in which participants were required to drive either in a city or a highway environment. During these drives, participants were asked to interact with an MP3 music player and make a series of either easy or difficult selections. It was found that participants who drove in the city made shorter glances to the in-car iPod than those that drove on the highway. As a result of this tactical change, participants had better lane keeping performance in the city, which was important given the narrower traffic lanes. As expected, we also replicate the well-known effect that more complex secondary in-car tasks are more distracting than simpler in-car tasks. The contribution this paper makes to the automotive UI community is that it provides evidence that drivers adapt to the demands of the driving environment even when interacting with secondary devices.