PERSONALITY
AT T E N T I O N ,
PLEASE Emeritus Professor Michael Regan is a psychologist with expert knowledge about driver distraction and inattention.
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t is widely accepted that driver distraction is a major contributor in causing many road crashes. Professor Mike Regan discusses factors inside and outside the vehicle which can affect a driver’s level of concentration. Prime Mover: Is it the internal or the external distractions that we should be working on or both? MR: Both really. Around 70 per cent of distraction-related crashes derive from driver interaction with sources within the vehicle such as mobile phones and passengers. The external distractions, however, have been less researched and are a little more difficult to manage than the internal ones. There are a number of things in the external environment which have been found in crash studies
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to be distracting including animals, interesting architecture, advertising signage, construction zones, crash scenes, and even road rage incidents. Some traffic signs themselves can be distracting if they are poorly designed and located and take up too much of your attention. PM: Is it natural for us to find something outside to draw our eyes away from the road ahead? MR: Generally you’d be doing that if the driving task itself was not particularly engaging, such as driving on a highway with hardly any traffic and no cross traffic. That’s when you find people will tend to allow their attention to drift away from driving itself. It’s not fundamentally the driver’s fault that distraction is a problem as they don’t
really understand the subtle impacts distraction has on their driving performance. When you’ve got your mind off the road that’s going to cause gaze concentration, which means you focus your eyes more on the straight road ahead and pay less attention to things in your periphery, like cross-traffic and rear-view mirrors. PM: Can people be taught not to be distracted? MR: Some of the sources of distraction that grab your attention involuntarily, like some advertising signage and spectacular scenery, are impossible to ignore. The information that young drivers get when they are learning to drive isn’t so much around understanding the effects of distraction and how to manage them. It’s more
