Interrupted by my car? Implications of interruption and interleaving research for automated vehicles

Abstract As vehicles of the future take on more of the driving responsibility and the role of the driver transitions into more of a monitoring capacity, the traditional notions of interruption and attention management needs to be reconsidered for automated vehicles. We argue that the transfer of control between the automated vehicle and the human driver can be considered as an interruption handling process, and that this process goes through a series of ten explicit stages. Each stage has its own characteristics and implications for practice and future research. Therefore, in this paper we identify for each stage what is known from theory, together with important implications for safety, design, and future research, especially for human-machine interaction. More generally, the framework makes explicit that it is not appropriate to think of transfer of control as a single event or even small set of events. The framework also highlights that it might not be realistic to expect human drivers to immediately respond correctly to a system initiated request to transfer control, given that humans interleave their attention between non-driving and driving tasks, and given that a transition constitutes of multiple stages. These nuances are accounted for in the framework.