MAINTAINING LANE POSITION WITH PERIPHERAL-VISION DURING IN-VEHICLE TASKS

Much research on driver attention, including evaluations of in-car equ ipment, at least implicitly assumes that attention is where the gaze i s. Research on the dynamics of visual attention, however, suggests tha t drivers may use peripheral vision and that they learn its use over t ime, depending on the task demands and eccentricity. To investigate ef fects of task load and position on lane keeping, 11 novices and 16 exp erienced 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 le vels in each of two different tasks. In the visual attention tasks, po sition had a clearly different effect on lane-keeping performance amon g novices and the experienced, as measured by the distance covered bef ore crossing a lane boundary. Novices' performance deteriorated with t he 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 tha t novices need foveal vision at first for lane keeping but, with incre asing practice, learn to manage with more peripheral vision. In the ar ithmetic tasks, however, no consistent experience-dependent task posit ion effects occurred. Different results obtained for different tasks i mply that when evaluating in-car facilities, the task characteristics and the respective resource allocation needed should be taken into acc ount.