Maintaining lane position with peripheral vision during in-vehicle tasks

Abstract

Much research on driver attention, including evaluations of in-car equipment, at least implicitly assumes that attention is where the gaze is. Research on the dynamics of visual attention, however, suggests that drivers may use peripheral vision and that they learn its use over time, depending on the task demands and eccentricity. To investigate effects of task load and position on lane keeping, 11 novices and 16 experienced drivers were asked to drive along a straight road using only peripheral vision for lane keeping while doing another task foveally. The task varied in position and in mental load, with two difficulty levels in each of two different tasks. In the visual attention tasks, position had a clearly different effect on lane- keeping performance among novices and the experienced, as measured by the distance covered before crossing a lane boundary. Novices' performance deteriorated with the foveal task at near periphery at the speedometer level, whereas the performance of experienced drivers dropped only when the foveal task was down in the middle console. The result supports the hypothesis that novices need foveal vision at first for lane keeping but, with increasing practice, learn to manage with more peripheral vision. In the arithmetic tasks, however, no consistent experience-dependent task position effects occurred. Different results obtained for different tasks imply that when evaluating in-car facilities, the task characteristics and the respective resource allocation needed should be taken into account.