The Effect of Attentional Demand in Eye Movement Behaviour when Driving

Eye movement behavior of subjects was measured while they watched a movie of the driver’s view of the road scene. Four experimental instructions were used to being about different attentional demands in the in the way the subjects were to watch the film. As the specificity of the instructions changed from undirected observation to directed search, subjects made fixations further from the focus of expansion and directed their fixation more frequently to the left of the road. Addition of a concurrent tracking task increased the proportion of central fixations and concentrated peripheral fixations closer to the focus of expansion.