Driving Under Voluntary and Involuntary Distraction: An Empirical Study of Compensatory Behaviors

To minimize the risk of distracted driving, drivers will take compensatory behaviors, such as deceleration and raising mental efforts. Moreover, it has been proved to be significantly different between voluntary and involuntary distractions which worth further exploration. Therefore, this study carried out an experiment of mobile communication distracted behaviors in simulated driving environment among 34 nonprofessional drivers. Independent variables include two triggers of driving distraction and two communication ways of mobile phone with complete within-subjects design. Dependent variables contain four dimensions, including driving behaviors, physiological indexes, mobile phone usage and NASA task load index (NASA-TLX). The results of vehicle driving simulator experiment reveal that drivers will take compensatory behaviors when taking driving distraction tasks, and the degree of compensatory behaviors is significantly different between voluntary and involuntary driving distraction. Generally, drivers would like to compensate more under involuntary driving distraction than voluntary driving distraction. The results of this paper give a new way to improve driving safety.