Effects of Memory Rehearsal on Driver Performance: Experiment and Theoretical Account

Objective: We report an experiment and a theoretical analysis concerning the effects of an exclusively cognitive task, specifically a memory rehearsal task, on driver performance. Background: Although recent work on driver distraction has elucidated the sometimes significant effects of cognitive processing on driver performance, these studies have typically mixed cognitive with perceptual and motor processing, making it difficult to isolate the effects of cognitive processing alone. Method: We asked participants to drive in a driving simulator during only the rehearsal stage of a serial-recall memory task while we measured their ability to maintain a central lane position and respond to the illumination of a lead vehicle's brake lights. Results: Memory rehearsal significantly affected drivers' steering performance as measured by lateral deviation from lane center, and it also significantly affected drivers' response time to the braking stimulus for the higher load memory task. Conclusion: These results lend support to a theoretical account of cognitive distraction provided by threaded cognition theory in terms of a cognitive bottleneck in procedural processing, and they also suggest that consideration of task urgency may be important in accounting for performance trade-offs among concurrent tasks. Application: The experiment augments the current understanding of cognitive driver distraction and suggests that even exclusively cognitive secondary tasks may sometimes affect driver performance.

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