Citation

Horowitz TS. Eye Auto 2009; 2009: 27.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

PURPOSE: Visual attention is a critical cognitive component of driving. From a visual attention point of view, driving involves two well-studied tasks: visual search and multiple object tracking. Visual search refers to finding a target item in a cluttered background, e.g. detecting a road sign. Multiple object tracking refers to an experimental paradigm in which observers follow a set of independently moving target objects among a set of identical distractor objects for several seconds or minutes. I will briefly review relevant findings from these two domains, then present recent work in which we demonstrate that multiple object tracking performance is disrupted by telephone conversation in exactly the same way as driving performance.

METHODS: Participants performed MOT under single- or dual-task conditions. Dual-task conditions included: engaging in a telephone conversation with an experimenter; narrative comprehension of an audiobook, with post-test; shadowing a list of words read by an experimenter; and generating words starting with the final letter of words read by the experimenter.

RESULTS: Neither narrative comprehension nor shadowing impaired MOT performance relative to the single-task baseline, indicating that neither listening nor speaking per se interfere with visual attention. However, both conversation and word generation did disrupt MOT performance.

CONCLUSIONS: Telephone conversation, or more specifically generating verbal content, disrupts visual attention processes as measured by MOT. Since these results mirrored those obtained with driving simulators, we argue that MOT has some validity as a proxy for the core attentional skills involved in driving. Currently, we are beginning a set of studies correlating MOT and visual search with simulator performance and actual driving performance.