Josh Mills

2016-03-03

Secondary Tasks

Should we move to hands-free devices?

The Goal

Overview of Study

1. How is driving performance affected by participating in phone conversations where the driver has to interact in varying levels of engagement? How do these effects vary with changes in driving difficulty?

2. How are phone conversations influenced by concurrently driving, and how do these effects vary with changes in the levels of driving difficulty?

3. How does performance vary with requests to prioritize attention on driving, conversation, or both tasks?

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Driving Task

Phone Task

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Focus

Focus more on driving

Focus more on phone conversation

focus on both considering them to be equally important

Measures

Results

Overall, users drove faster while focusing on driving

There were no significant differences across the different call types

Being engaged in a complex secondary task that conflicts with the driving task in an obvious way may lead drivers to modulate driving speed in an attempt to ensure safe driving

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Overall:

Requested focus did not appear to have a major impact on driving performance, as automaticity seemed to allow users to drive and converse simultaneously

Focus did have a stronger effect on the performance on the conversations

Results suggest that large displays facilitate tasks with multiple windows and rich information because they offer a more immersive experience, with enhanced peripheral awareness

Larger displays promote physical navigation and improve user performance for search, navigation and pattern-finding tasks

Take-aways

Future Applications