Influence of Wayfinding while Driving on Vehicle Control

Project summary:

This work builds on previous work done by the principal investigator on driving and navigating in which older drivers seem to be less oriented in a newly learned environment than younger drivers. This second project is looking at the consequences of this problem at the level of vehicle control. If driving while wayfinding causes problems for older drivers, it seems reasonable to see this problem as a so-called dual-task, or mental workload, problem. Experiment participants were confronted with two tasks: driving, and driving while wayfinding, in a simulator. Drivers under one condition simply had to drive without paying attention to where they were going, while drivers under the other condition needed to keep track of the layout of the environment and their route through it. Three measures of mental workload were taken and compared as a function of age. The data have been collected on this project and are currently being analyzed.