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Many metrics have been used in an attempt to predict the effects of secondary tasks on driving behavior. Such metrics often give rise to seemingly paradoxical results, with one metric suggesting increased demand and another metric suggesting decreased demand for the same task. For example, for some tasks, drivers maintain their lane well yet detect events relatively poorly. For other tasks, drivers maintain their lane relatively poorly yet detect events relatively well. These seeming paradoxes are not time-accuracy trade-offs or experimental artifacts, because for other tasks, drivers do both well. The paradoxes are resolved if driver demand is modeled in two orthogonal dimensions rather than a single “driver workload” dimension. Principal components analysis (PCA) was applied to the published data from four simulator, track, and open road studies of visual-manual secondary task effects on driving.

This study investigated driver glances while engaging in infotainment tasks in a stationary vehicle while surrogate driving: watching a driving video recorded from a driver’s viewpoint and projected on a large screen, performing a lane-tracking task, and performing the Tactile Detection Response Task (TDRT) to measure attentional effects of secondary tasks on event detection and response. Twenty-four participants were seated in a 2014 Toyota Corolla production vehicle with the navigation system option. They performed the lane-tracking task using the vehicle’s steering wheel, fitted with a laser pointer to indicate wheel movement on the driving video. Participants simultaneously performed the TDRT and a variety of infotainment tasks, including Manual and Mixed-Mode versions of Destination Entry and Cancel, Contact Dialing, Radio Tuning, Radio Preset selection, and other Manual tasks. Participants also completed the 0-and 1-Back pure auditory-vocal tasks.

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.