Attentional competition between tasks and ITS implications

Attentional processes are necessary for any complex activity, such as driving. The aim of this study is to highlight the involvement of attentional problems and their weight in accident causation, using data from in-depth analysis of accidents. Three attentional defaults are distinguished according to the task that competes with driving activity: inattention, attentional competition, and distraction. Inattention is the default the most represented (74.5 per cent) by comparison with attentional competition (19.1 per cent) and distraction (6.4 per cent). Overall, attentional defaults lead mainly to perceptual failures (45 per cent). In more than half of the cases, it requires other factors for a driving error to emerge. The importance of this study of human failures linked to attention defects is that it allows us to define driver's needs and thus identify which systems are the most relevant and, on the other hand, those which lessen attention the capacity required for driving.