A simulator evaluation of the effects of attention maintenance training on glance distributions of younger novice drivers inside and outside the vehicle

• PC based attention maintenance training program evaluated on a driving simulator.
• Training program focused on limiting the duration of drivers’ in-vehicle glances.
• Distribution of eye movement durations of trained and placebo group was compared.
• Training effectively reduced proportion of long glances inside the vehicle.
• Training was not found to limit long glances at out-of-vehicle distractions.

Driver distraction inside and outside the vehicle is increasingly a problem, especially for younger drivers. In many cases the distraction is associated with long glances away from the forward roadway. Such glances have been shown to be highly predictive of crashes. Ideally, one would like to develop and evaluate a training program which reduced these long glances. Thus, an experiment was conducted in a driving simulator to test the efficacy of a training program, FOCAL, that was developed to teach novice drivers to limit the duration of glances that are inside the vehicle while performing an in-vehicle task, such as looking for a CD or finding the 4-way flashers. The test in the simulator showed that the FOCAL trained group performed significantly better than the placebo trained group on several measures, notably on the percentage of within-vehicle glances that were greater than 2, 2.5, and 3 s. However, the training did not generalize to glances away from the roadway (e.g., when drivers were asked to attend to a sign adjacent to the roadway, both trained and untrained novice drivers were equally likely to make especially long glances at the sign).