01153405

Component

Failure to maintain attention on the roadway has been shown to be one of the three major causes of crashes. There are also significant differences between novice and more experienced drivers, both in a driving simulator and on the road in terms of how they distribute glances away from the forward roadway. This research is a first step in addressing the problem of inferior attention maintenance in novice drivers. First, an instrument was developed to assess attention maintenance (AMAP) on a PC-platform that is easy to use, and verified in Experiment 1 that AMAP showed significant differences on key measures of distribution of attention maintenance between novice and more experienced drivers. Second, as there are no current programs designed to train novice drivers to glance away for less than 2 seconds at a time while attending to critical in-vehicle events, a PC-platform attention-maintenance training program (FOCAL) was developed. This was tested in Experiment 2, and there were large, significant, differences on AMAP between a FOCAL-trained group and a placebo-trained group. It is argued that there is good reason to expect that this result will generalize to testing on a driving simulator and to actual driving.

01147878

10-0391

English

17p

2010

Transportation Research Board 89th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures (3) ; Photos (1) ; References (13)

Attention; Automobile drivers; Automobile driving; Crash causes; Distraction; Driver education; Driver experience; Driving simulators; Highway safety; Recently qualified drivers

Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I83: Accidents and the Human Factor

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2010 Paper #10-0391

TRIS, TRB

Jan 25 2010 10:13AM