Cognitive Load On The Driver's Visual Attention To The Impact Of Eye Movement

Drivers’attention will be diverted by using mobile devices while driving, which will easily cause serious traffic accident. Drivers mainly depend on visual system to capture road information, so it is significant to explore the effects of cognitive load on the drivers’visual attention model.This research has adopted eye movement technique to study the influence of cognitive load on the drivers’ visual attention model, which involves in two experiments.With the help of Tobii T120eye tracker, Experiment1was devoted to explore the influence of the visual load and auditory load on the eye movement and driving behavior of drivers, which was designed with mixed factors:2(visual load:high or low)×2(auditory load:yes or no).Combined eye movement technique with flicker-paradigm, Experiment2was aimed to explore the different strategies of the drivers’visual attention models on searching different positions of target with the change of and safety-related scenes under the conditions of interference and non-interference respectively.With the aid of Eyelink2000, experiment2a explored the drivers’attention model under the condition of non-interference. We employed2(change type:relevant, irrelevant)x2(change position:center, edge) within subjects design. The only difference between Experiment2b and Experiment2a was that participants needed to complete two tasks at the same time, one is the change of detection task, and the other is mathematical computing task. The purpose was to discuss the drivers’attention mechanism under the condition of external interference.Based on this research, the specific conclusions were as follows:(1) The visual and auditory load affected driving behavior, the higher the load was, the worse the performance of driving behavior would be.(2) The visual and auditory load was a superposition to the destructive impact of driving behavior, rather than the interaction.(3) Without outside distraction, drivers could pay attention to the resources related to driving safety and the center area of situation events, even part of the edge areas also got the same information processing; with distraction, the cognitive load to the destruction of the driving behavior was not entire, because the driver could distribute the limited resource to the events related to driving safety, and the effect on position factors was not serious, the information processing level of central areas were still higher than the edge areas.