title: Attentional capture in driving displays.
abstract: Drivers face frequent distraction on the roadways, but little is known about situations placing them at risk of misallocating visual attention. To investigate this issue, we asked participants to search for a red target embedded within simulated driving scenes (photographs taken from inside a car) in three experiments. Distraction was induced by presenting, via a GPS unit, red or green distractors positioned in an irrelevant location at which the target never appeared. If the salient distractor captures attention, visual search should be slower on distractor-present trials than distractor-absent trials. In Experiment 1, salient distractors yielded no such capture effect. In Experiment 2, we decreased the frequency of the salient distractor from 50% of trials to only 10% or 20% of trials. Capture effects were almost five times larger for the 10% occurrence group than for the 20% occurrence group. In Experiment 3, the amount of available central resources was manipulated by asking participants to either simultaneously monitor or ignore a stream of spoken digits. Capture effects were much larger for the dual-task group than for the single-task group. In summary, these findings identify risk factors for attentional capture in real-world driving scenes: distractor rarity and diversion of attention.
authors.affiliation: Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France.
authors.forename: Mahé
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Arexis
authors.affiliation: Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France.
authors.forename: François
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Maquestiaux
authors.affiliation: University of California, Davis, California, USA.
authors.forename: Nicholas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Gaspelin
authors.affiliation: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ruthruff
authors.affiliation: Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France.|Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France.
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Didierjean
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D000071826:Distracted Driving; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: 
  GPS
  ; attentional capture; driving; visual search