An empirical investigation into dual-task trade-offs while driving and dialing

Engaging in a secondary task, such as dialing a cell phone, while driving a car has been found to have a deleterious effect on driver performance. A point often overlooked though is that people can potentially vary the extent to which these two tasks are interleaved (i.e., attention can be returned to driving more or less often while dialing). To investigate this idea of strategic variability in multitasking behavior, an experiment was conducted in a driving simulator in which participants were instructed to focus on dialing as quickly as possible or on steering as safely as possible. It was found that participants drove more safely when encouraged to do so. However, driving safely necessarily brought about an increase in the total time to complete the dialing task because of frequent task interleaving. In contrast, there was a significant increase in the lateral deviation of the car from the lane centre when participants were encouraged to complete the dialing task as quickly as poss...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: BCSHCI
• Authors: Duncan P. Brumby, Dario D. Salvucci, Andrew Howes
• Keywords: BCSHCI 2007, Dialing, Dialing Task, Human Computer Interaction, Secondary Task