Driving on familiar roads: Automaticity and inattention blindness

•Driving on familiar routes led to inattention blindness for roadside features.•Practice led to greater sensitivity detecting features needed for driving.•Practice in detection of irrelevant features led to automatic detection.•Changing appearance of familiar roads led to disruption of proceduralize...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Transportation research. Part F, Traffic psychology and behaviour Traffic psychology and behaviour, 2013-07, Vol.19, p.121-133
Main Authors: Charlton, Samuel G., Starkey, Nicola J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automotive components
Blindness
Centipede’s dilemma
Change blindness
Crashes
Driver attention
Driving simulator
Roads
Simulation
Tasks
Transportation
Vehicles
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•Driving on familiar routes led to inattention blindness for roadside features.•Practice led to greater sensitivity detecting features needed for driving.•Practice in detection of irrelevant features led to automatic detection.•Changing appearance of familiar roads led to disruption of proceduralized driving. This paper describes our research into the processes that govern driver attention and behavior in familiar, well-practiced situations. The experiment examined the effects of extended practice on inattention blindness and detection of changes to the driving environment in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Participants were paid to drive a simulated road regularly over 3months of testing. A range of measures, including detection task performance and driving performance, were collected over the course of 20 sessions. Performance from a yoked Control Group who experienced the same road scenarios in a single session was also measured. The data showed changes in what drivers reported noticing indicative of inattention blindness, and declining ratings of mental demand suggesting that many participants were “driving without awareness”. Extended practice also resulted in increased sensitivity for detecting changes to road features associated with vehicle guidance and improved performance on an embedded vehicle detection task (detection of a specific vehicle type). The data provide new light on a “tandem model” of driver behavior that includes both explicit and implicit processes involved in driving performance. The findings also suggest reasons drivers are most likely to crash at locations very near their homes.
ISSN:1369-8478
1873-5517
DOI:10.1016/j.trf.2013.03.008