Selective Attention with Auxiliary Automobile Displays

Emerging intelligent vehicle-highway systems technology will have a profound impact on the design of future driver interfaces. A series of experiments was conducted to investigate basic human factors issues relating to the design and use of auxiliary in-vehicle displays. A total of thirty healthy male and female student volunteers drove in a moving-base driving simulator and performed auxiliary cognitive tasks on a CRT display. Measures of driving performance, attentional behaviour, auxiliary task performance and workload indicated that performing auxiliary tasks while driving can significantly degrade performance. The effects were manifested even more strongly in subjects' attentional responses. Multiple Resource Theory predictions were not upheld, indicating that the nature and extent of intrusion were relatively robust with respect to task resource structure. Finally, the results provided no evidence that the payment of bonuses was effective in shifting relative resource allocation between these tasks.