Relationships Between Older Drivers' Cognitive Abilities as Assessed on the MoCA and Glance Patterns During Visual-Manual Radio Tuning While Driving.

Objective: Research has established that long off-road glances increase crash risk, and other work has shown increased off-road glance behavior in older drivers. This study investigated the relationship between older drivers' (M = 66.3, range 61-69 years) cognitive abilities and the duration of off-road glances while engaged in secondary visual-manual activities. Method: Twenty-two drivers completed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) prior to driving an instrumented vehicle and completing a set of radio-tuning tasks. Glance behavior was recorded and manually coded into 7 glance regions (toward the forward roadway, instrument cluster, center stack, rearview mirror, left, right, and other). Results: On average, older drivers with higher MoCA scores used shorter glances and glanced away from the forward roadway for less total time when manually tuning the radio. Discussion: These findings suggest that lower MoCA scores may represent a driving force behind the "age" differences reported in earlier studies of off-road glance behavior. Questions are raised concerning the identification of MoCA scores that might be used as inclusion cut-points in driving research and in identifying individuals needing further evaluation related to suitability for continuance of driving.

How safe is tuning a radio?: using the radio tuning task as a benchmark for distracted driving.

Drivers engage in non-driving tasks while driving, such as interactions entertainment systems. Studies have identified glance patterns related to such interactions, and manual radio tuning has been used as a reference task to set an upper bound on the acceptable demand of interactions. Consequently, some view the risk associated with radio tuning as defining the upper limit of glance measures associated with visual-manual in-vehicle activities. However, we have little knowledge about the actual degree of crash risk that radio tuning poses and, by extension, the risk of tasks that have similar glance patterns as the radio tuning task. In the current study, we use counterfactual simulation to take the glance patterns for manual radio tuning tasks from an on-road experiment and apply these patterns to lead-vehicle events observed in naturalistic driving studies. We then quantify how often the glance patterns from radio tuning are associated with rear-end crashes, compared to driving only situations. We used the pre-crash kinematics from 34 crash events from the SHRP2 naturalistic driving study to investigate the effect of radio tuning in crash-imminent situations, and we also investigated the effect of radio tuning on 2,475 routine braking events from the Safety Pilot project. The counterfactual simulation showed that off-road glances transform some near-crashes that could have been avoided into crashes, and glance patterns observed in on-road radio tuning experiment produced 2.85-5.00 times more crashes than baseline driving.