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Divided Attention and Driving: A Pilot Study Using Virtual Reality Technology (Lengenfelder, Schultheis, Al-Shihabi, Mourant & DeLuca, 2002)

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Divided Attention and Driving: A Pilot Study Using Virtual Reality Technology (Lengenfelder, Schultheis, Al-Shihabi, Mourant & DeLuca, 2002)

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VR used to investigate influence of divided attention on driving performance
Driving divided attention task:
-Consisted of primary and secondary task
-Primary: driving using VR
-Secondary: attending to numbers in visual field
-Ps speed recorded whilst driving using VR and numbers which appeared on screen were read aloud and recorded
Results:
-Speed increased when secondary task was added to driving
-When drivers attend to multiple sources of information, they make more errors on secondary task whilst primary task (of driving) is less effected

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Meta analysis of around 2000 individuals
-Reaction time to events increase by 250ms when individuals were using a phone
-Seen across multiple test settings eg lab, driving simulator
-Effect was more prominent when those using the phone were also talking (not just listening)

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Redelmeier & Tibishirani (1997)
-Examined mobile phone records of 699 drivers who were all involved in an accident
Findings:
-Using mobile phone whilst driving quadrupled the risk of a collision occurring (using a hands free phone was no safer and had great risks)
-This same risk of collision no matter age or experience of driver (practice at driving did not reduce this risk)

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the ability to respond to multiple tasks at the same time
impacted by;
- practise
- task difficulty
- task similarity

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when the target and distractor were both letters (instead of numbers) no automaticity was shown.
this is because numbers stand out better than letters

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Studied the relationship between the presence of phones and quality of soical interactions in a naturalistic field experiment.

200 ppts (100dyads), asked to spend 10mins talking about views on plastic holiday trees or the most significant event of the past year.

Results:
1/3 (29dyads) a phone was taken out. in survey, the quality of conversation in the presence of phones was rated less fulfilling.

The effect was stronger in closer relationships.

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Controlled: involves conscious use of attention, for example, when driving. For beginners, they have to consciously pay attention to everything.

Automatic: task can be performed without conscious awareness/effort. well-practised tasks can be performed automatically. For example, driving.

In automatic processing, brain areas involved in conscious thought processing (Pre-frontal cortex) become less active (Ramsey, Slagter and Khan, 2001).

With musical instruments (etc..) enough practice leads to tasks becoming muscle memory.

New drivers have to consciously think about, whereas skilled drivers could be thinking of something else whilst driving. Though this is not the same as performing another task.

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Drews, Pasupathi and Strayer -
When talking to the passenger the nature of the traffic can become part of the conversation. When this happens both the driver and passenger show situational awareness. It was found that when in high traffic the passenger tends to talk less, meaning the driver could concentrate on the road more. However when the passenger is too controlling when commenting and directing attention it has the potential to negatively impact the driver.

Comparing this to using mobile phones when driving, it is a lot easier to divide attention to the passenger than to a mobile phone. This could be due to having practice and it not being a difficult task to talk to the person beside you.

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Schneider and Shiffrin (1977)
participants shown a target stimulus then shown test frames rapidly and asked whether the target stimulus was presented in the test frames.

this experiment required participants to:
retain the target in their memory
attend to the distractor stimuli

FINDINGS;
initially, performance was 55% correct but rose to 90% around 900 trials.
after 60 trials, participants reported a sense of automaticity.

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McCleod (1977) demonstrated task modality.

participants identified tones by pointing at labels or identifying verbally AT THE SAME TIME as following the contour of a line.

FINDINGS;
there were more errors in the contour task when the tone task required pointing.
this was because the similar nature of the tasks made it harder.

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Strayer and Johnstone (2001) -
In this experiment participants, when using a mobile, had to press the brakes in response to a red light.
Results showed that regardless of using a hand-held mobile or a hand-free one reaction times were slower and cause them to miss the red lights.

Strayer et al (2003) -
There were two groups,
Group 1 - drive in simulator and brake unexpectedly.
Group 2 - drive and talk on hands-free phone at the same time, then brake unexpectedly.
Results showed that when in low traffic group 2 took slightly more time to brake and when in high traffic group 2 too much longer to brake.