Influence of Driver’s Career and Secondary Cognitive Task on Visual Search Behavior in Driving: A Dual-Task Paradigm
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Summary
This study investigates how driving experience and secondary cognitive tasks influence visual search behavior and dual-task performance in drivers. Motivated by the high risk of accidents associated with distracted driving, the research addresses a gap in literature regarding how visual search strategies vary between novice and experienced drivers under cognitive load. The authors hypothesized that dual-tasking would degrade performance, particularly for novices, and that visual search patterns would differ based on driving career and task difficulty. The experiment involved twenty male participants divided into two groups: experienced drivers (mean driving career of 5.6 years) and novice drivers (mean experience of 2.1 months). Using a computerized driving simulator with a head-mounted eye-tracking system, participants drove at 120 km/h on a highway course while performing one of three conditions: no secondary task, an easy cognitive task (single-digit addition), or a hard cognitive task (double-digit addition). Performance metrics included average driving speed, correct response rates for the cognitive tasks, and visual fixation durations across seven specific areas of interest, such as the near and far road areas and mirrors. The results indicated that while driving speed remained stable across conditions, cognitive task performance significantly declined during dual-tasking compared to baseline. Novice drivers exhibited greater decrements in cognitive accuracy than experienced drivers. Regarding visual behavior, total fixation duration decreased as cognitive task difficulty increased. Crucially, driving experience significantly influenced gaze allocation: experienced drivers fixated longer on the far area of the road and specific instrument panels, whereas novice drivers fixated longer on the near area. Additionally, as cognitive demand increased, fixation duration on the far road area decreased while fixation on the near area increased, indicating a narrowing of visual attention. The study concludes that experienced drivers employ more efficient gaze control strategies, maintaining a wider field of view that allows for better information processing and faster responses to hazards. In contrast, novice drivers narrow their visual focus under cognitive load, which may increase accident risk. The findings emphasize the importance of perceptual skills in driving safety and suggest that training interventions should specifically target visual search strategies, particularly for high-risk novice drivers, to mitigate the detrimental effects of cognitive distraction.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | unpaywall | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 10 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified.
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- Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data
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