Citation

Pauzié A. Cogn. Technol. Work 2014; 16(3): 299-302.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10111-014-0276-0

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Human factors research and debate related to mental workload have been going on for decades since the 60's (McKenzie et al. 1966) and is still happening (Finomore et al. 2013). The raised issues are: is it useful ("do we need the concept of mental workload or do we have to banish it for good?" Leplat 2002), is it scientifically credible (Dekker et al. 2010), and, in case of a positive answer, how to measure it (Jex 1988). In the context of the driving task, human factors research is abundant and diversified, aiming at a better understanding of driver behavior and functional capacities in terms of perception, cognition, and motor processes in order to improve road safety (Lee 2008), drivers' mental workload being an important issue to consider in this framework (Dick de Waard 1996). This problematic is even more crucial since the deployment of onboard Intelligent Transport System in the vehicles (Carsten and Nilsson 2001), as human factors have the responsibility to evaluate whether these innovative systems really support the driving task or, on the contrary, lead to distraction and increase mental workload, with potential dramatic consequences in terms of road safety. So, since the beginning of research in this area, the objectives have been to establish methods of assessing fluctuations in mental workload that are sensitive to the various aspects of attentional processing requirements in relation to both external environmental conditions, such as traffic density as well as in-vehicle conditions, such as competing visual and auditory displays (Pauzie´ and Amditis 2010). Workload can be defined as a hypothetical construct that represents the cost incurred by a human operator to achieve a particular level of performance (Hart 1986). Driving performance and the driver's mental workload are both relevant and complementary parameters to consider, knowing that they can vary independently (Yeh and Wickens 1988). Indeed, if the complexity of the task increases, the driver is able to maintain a stable performance to a certain degree, by increasing effort.


Keywords: Driver distraction;

Language: en