Abstract
Objectives: Attention Restoration Theory (ART) suggests that walking or being in natural settings, as opposed to urban environments, benefits cognitive skills because it is less demanding on attentional resources. However, it is unclear whether the same occurs when the person is performing a complex task such as driving, although it is proven that driving through different road environments is associated with different levels of fatigue and may engage attention differently. The present study investigated whether exposure to rural vs. urban road environments while driving would affect attentional capacity in young people after the drive, in line with the classic ART paradigms.Methods: We asked 38 young participants to complete the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) before and after being exposed to a rural or urban road in a virtual reality environment while driving in a full vehicle immersive driving simulator. Changes in SART performance based on environmental exposure where explored in terms of target sensitivity, accuracy, reaction times, and inverse efficiency. We analyzed potential road type effects on driving speed and accuracy. Possible effects of driving on attention were tested by comparing the sample performance to that of a control group of 15 participants who did not drive and sat on the passenger seat instead.Results: Exposure to rural or urban road environments in the driving sample was not associated with any significant changes in attentional performance. The two exposure groups did not differ significantly in terms of driving behavior. Comparisons between the driving sample and the control group controlling for age indicated that participants who drove were more accurate but slower at the SART than those who were passengers.Conclusion: The present study does not support the hypothesis that a short drive in a natural setting may promote attention restoration as compared to an urban setting. Methodological considerations as well as recommendations for future research are discussed.
Highlights
Research has demonstrated that road characteristics can impact both driving behavior and the activities the driver will undertake once arrived to destination (Antonson et al, 2009; Keay et al, 2009; Calvi, 2015; Murphy and Greene, 2016; Cassarino and Murphy, 2018)
There was a main effect of environmental exposure for the measure of d’ (F1,36 = 4.18, p = 0.048, μ2 = 0.11), with participants in the rural exposure group (M = 1.26, SD = 1.07) showing overall higher sensitivity than the urban exposure group (M = 0.62, SD = 0.84)
We found that the driving behavior of two exposure groups did not differ significantly for any of the measures of interest: average speed (t35 = 0.21, p = 0.84), standard deviation from average speed (t35 = 0.61, p = 0.55), average lane position (t36 = 0.03, p = 0.97), standard deviation from average lane position (t36 = −1.71, p = 0.09), speed excess (t36 = 0.45, p = 0.65), or lane excursions (t36 = 1.67, p = 0.11)
Summary
Research has demonstrated that road characteristics can impact both driving behavior and the activities the driver will undertake once arrived to destination (Antonson et al, 2009; Keay et al, 2009; Calvi, 2015; Murphy and Greene, 2016; Cassarino and Murphy, 2018). Higher cognitive demands translate into less safe driving, and into poorer cognitive performance after the drive (Murphy and Greene, 2016) These findings support the idea that environmental situations that are perceptually complex (e.g., presenting visual clutter) engage more attentional resources and are more cognitively fatiguing (Lavie et al, 2004). Complementing this hypothesis, encouraging evidence suggests that the impact of road characteristics on drivers’ attentional resources may depend on the presence of natural elements. Supportive evidence has come from neuroimaging as well (Martínez-Soto et al, 2013; Bratman et al, 2015; Chen et al, 2016), recent systematic reviews have shown that restorative effects are small (de Keijzer et al, 2016; Ohly et al, 2016)
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