Attentional Tracking of Multiple Vehicles in a Highway Driving Scenario

In this paper the authors introduce a 'vehicle tracking' task, which tests the ability of a driver to track the location of multiple vehicles on the roadway. Based on the 'multiple object tracking' task (Pylyshyn & Storm, 1988), the vehicle tracking task presents the driver with an array of identical vehicles immediately in front of the subject vehicle. The task consists of three distinct stages: encoding, during which the target vehicles are indicated to the driver; tracking, during which all vehicles change lanes in a random order; and report, during which the participant indicates the final location of the target vehicles. Using this methodology, the authors test the accuracy with which university-aged drivers can track multiple vehicles in a 3-lane highway driving scenario. Their particular interest in this paper is how the ability to attend to multiple vehicles changes as task load increases.