Issues arising from the HASTE experiments

Abstract

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] The HASTE project work discussed in the foregoing papers can be depicted as being aimed at answering two questions: “Does greater secondary task load from an In-Vehicle Information System (IVIS) lead to an identifiably worse performance in the primary task of driving?” and “How much distraction is too much?”. There is, of course, a huge amount of literature examining the effect of distraction on driving. Some of this concerns visual distraction (e.g. Holohan, Culler & Wilcox, 1978; Dingus, Antin, Hulse & Wierwille, 1989; Wierwille & Tijerina, 1996; Wallace, 2003), while other parts cover distraction from cognitive (auditory) tasks such as mobile phone use (e.g. Stevens & Paulo, 1999; Svenson & Patten, 2003). But, in spite of this large background of research, it can be argued that the HASTE work was pioneering in the sense that it attempted to differentiate between the effects of visual and cognitive distraction and at the same time it attempted to carefully control the “dose” of distraction administered at any one time. These dose-response studies were carried out in three common but quite different experimental settings, a laboratory set-up, advanced driving simulators, and in instrumented vehicles in the field. The project also examined the reliability of the evaluation, with for example six replications of the rural road studies across a variety of driving simulators in five different countries.