Situation awareness and secondary task performance while driving

For safe driving it is necessary that the drivers perceive the relevant objects of a situation, comprehend the meaning of these objects to form a holistic understanding of the current situation, and predict the future development of the situation. A concept that aims to describe and integrate these different cognitive processes is situation awareness, for example [1]. According to this concept it is assumed that a mental representation is constructed, maintained, and updated while driving. Attentional and working memory (WM) resources are involved in these processes. If secondary tasks performed while driving impose significant load on visual attention and WM, then one can expect that situation awareness is impaired. We investigated these predictions in 2 experiments. The results show that both cognitively and visually demanding tasks interfere with the maintenance of a correct situation model in memory. Visually demanding tasks do not always seem to interfere with visual attention processes in ways that lead to degraded situation awareness.