Colloquium Series 2017-2018

Lana Trick
University of Guelph

The long drive home: Secondary tasks, mind-wandering and finding the happy medium between over- and underload

In Canada, many individuals put in long hours on the road driving to and from work.  On an undemanding and familiar drive, driving may not use of all of the available cognitive resources, leaving the driver in conditions of underload. Under those circumstances drivers may be tempted to engage in external secondary tasks such as cell phone conversations and texting, which overload the drivers’ attentional resources. However, performance may also deteriorate even without external secondary tasks, as occurs with mind-wandering. When this occurs, drivers withdraw their attention from the external task of driving over time and become absorbed in their own thoughts. A series of studies are presented in which a driving simulator is used to assess changes in driving performance as a function of time, secondary tasks, and individual differences related to working memory and sustained attention.