On the Effects of Listening and Talking to Humans and Devices on Driving

The body of research on cognitive distraction while driving is vast and spans many decades. To this research, the authors of the target article add three experiments that measure a number of cognitive tasks across laboratory, simulation, and on-road contexts. The pattern of decrements is similar across contexts, when expressed as an index, and when compared to previous research. Measurement, task, and generalizability issues arise from the approaches taken by the authors. For example, the use of "pure" cognitive tasks may not necessarily generalize to everyday driving behavior, wherein visual and physical distractions are inherently interleaved with cognitive tasks. A valuable contribution of the authors' future research on cognitive distractions would be to predict relative crash risk.