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Up to now, there is no standard methodology that addresses how driver distraction is affected by perceptual demand and working memory demand - aside from visual allocation. In 2009, the Peripheral Detection Task (PDT) became a NHTSA recommended measure for driver distraction [1]. Then the PDT task was renamed as the Detection Response Task (DRT) because the International Standards Organization (ISO) has identified this task as a potential method for assessing selective attention in detection of visual, auditory, tactile and haptic events while driving. The DRT is also under consideration for adoption as an ISO standard surrogate test for driver performance for new telematics designs. The Wayne State University (WSU) driver imaging group [2, 3] improved the PDT and created the Enhanced Peripheral Detection Task I (EPDT-I) [4]. The EPDT-I is composed of a simple visual event detection task and a video of a real-world driving scene.

This paper discusses radio usage habits observed during analysis of 700 hours of video sampled from the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study database. Analysts used large-scale printouts of each vehicle's radio faceplate and recorded interactions based on video analysis of hand movement and location (without the assistance of audio recordings). The duration and specific manipulations or adjustments were recorded for each interaction. The results summarize the length and type of interactions, most often-used controls, and total percentage of time drivers interacted with the radio.

How do in-vehicle telematics devices influence mind-on-the-drive? We determined the spatio-temporal properties of the brain mechanisms during a simple visual event detection and motor response in a validated driving-like protocol. We used the safe and non-invasive brain imaging methods of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to locate the essential brain activated structures and their corresponding temporal dynamics. This study sets the foundation for determining the fundamental brain mechanisms by which secondary tasks (such as cell phone use) may affect the responses to visual events in a laboratory setting. Improved knowledge of the brain mechanisms underlying selective attention in such driving-like situations may give rise to methods for improving mind-on-the-drive.