An on-road assessment of cognitive distraction: impacts on drivers' visual behavior and braking performance

In this on-road experiment, drivers performed demanding cognitive tasks while driving in city traffic. All task interactions were carried out in hands-free mode so that the 21 drivers were not required to take their visual attention away from the road or to manually interact with a device inside the vehicle. Visual behavior and vehicle control were assessed while they drove an 8 km city route under three conditions: no additional task, easy cognitive task and difficult cognitive task. Changes in visual behavior were most apparent when performance between the No Task and Difficult Task conditions were compared. When looking outside of the vehicle, drivers spent more time looking centrally ahead and spent less time looking to the areas in the periphery. Drivers also reduced their visual monitoring of the instruments and mirrors, with some drivers abandoning these tasks entirely. When approaching and driving through intersections, drivers made fewer inspection glances to traffic lights compared to the No Task condition and their scanning of intersection areas to the right was also reduced. Vehicle control was also affected; during the most difficult cognitive tasks there were more occurrences of hard braking. Although hands-free designs for telematics devices are intended to reduce or eliminate the distraction arising from manual operation of these units, the potential for cognitive distraction associated with their use must also be considered and appropriately assessed. These changes are captured in measures of drivers' visual behavior.