Distracted Driving while doing Mobile Phone Conversation: A Driving Simulator Study

Abstract

Mobile phone is a very useful instrument to mankind whereby it can do lots more than make and receive telephone calls. Unfortunately, it has the potential to distract drivers in many ways. The aim of the study is to measure the distraction in term of participants’ response time for different conversation task and driving scenarios using a driving simulator. In this study, 54 participants completed a secondary task (i.e. mobile phone conversation task) while concurrently performing the Detection Response Task (DRT) in a driving simulated environment. For driving scenarios comparison, three scenarios were used; free flow (40 km/h) with medium traffic volume, free flow (40 km/h) without traffic and traffic jam. For different conversation task, the contents of conversation were in emotional and factual conditions with hands-free and hand-held mobile phone. Overall, the results of this research showed that participants responded to lesser stimuli when dealing with more difficult conversation task. On another note, we also found that drivers were more distracted when dealing with more demanding tasks of using mobile phone (i.e. conversation tasks) as compared to baseline. In addition, participants attended the worst in term of stimuli and higher response time in traffic jam scenario as compared to other scenarios. Besides, the study discovered that novice drivers’ group was identified to respond significantly faster rate than the experience drivers’ group.