Mutual interferences of driving and texting performance

Abstract

Despite legislative and social campaigns to reduce texting while driving, drivers continue to text behind the wheel. There is abundant evidence demonstrating that texting while driving impairs driving performance. While past driver distraction research has focused on how texting influences driving, the influence of driving on texting behaviors has been overlooked. This study used a Lane Change Task and a smartphone texting application to study the mutual influences of driving and texting. Results showed that concurrent texting impaired driving by increasing the lane deviation. Meanwhile, driving impaired texting by increasing texting completion time, texting errors, and key entry time intervals, and reduced key entry speed. In addition, we show that texting behavioral data collected can be used to distinguish texting while driving from texting-only condition with an accuracy of 88.5%. The mutual interferences of driving and texting inform the theory of dual-task performance and provide a scientific foundation to develop a smartphone-based technology to reduce the risky behavior of texting while driving.