FURI | Spring 2022

Unintentional Costs of Vehicle Alert Modality for Driving Hazards

The current research aims to better understand how the modality of in-vehicle alerts affects attention allocation for identification and response to simultaneously occurring driving hazards. The research will use a driving simulator to compare the effects of two stimuli (audio, visual) as alerts on the response times to a secondary hazard. Based on existing research, it is hypothesized that due to the already high demand of visual resources during driving, auditory warnings will be more effective in alerting drivers to simultaneously occurring secondary hazards and reducing driver response times and attentional costs for both hazards.