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Driven to Distraction: Exploring Mind Wandering During a Virtual Reality City Drive

Published: 22 September 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Research has characterized mind-wandering as humans’ natural mental state, with moments of task-focused attention being the exception. With this framing, mind-wandering while driving likely occurs more than generally acknowledged, and seems poised to increase with higher levels of automation. This in turn may have adverse effects on drivers’ abilities to regain situation awareness or resume control when needed. Of the prior work on detecting mind-wandering while driving, none focuses on automation or complex urban environments. We ran an exploratory study (N = 14) of an automated drive through New York City in a two-dimensional virtual reality context, focusing on physiological measures such as gaze distribution, pupillometry, and heart rate. We also explored how drivers missing critical events may be a potential new measure. Results varied between focused and mind-wandering mental states and between moving and stopped driving contexts. These observations are an initial step toward understanding mind-wandering across diverse driving scenarios.

Supplemental Material

MP4 File - Video Figure for Driven to Distraction
This video figure compares the gaze behavior of the study?s most predominantly focused-on-task participant and its most predominantly mind-wandering participant. The scene shows a drive in New York City as the vehicle enters Columbus Circle from Eighth Avenue, stops at a traffic light, and continues through on Central Park South. The predominantly focused participant scans the scene broadly, checks the traffic light 10 times, and tracks pedestrians throughout the scene. The predominantly mind-wandering participant keeps a more centrally focused gaze, checks the traffic light only once, and also tracks pedestrians.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AutomotiveUI '24: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications
September 2024
438 pages
ISBN:9798400705106
DOI:10.1145/3640792
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 22 September 2024

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  1. Distraction
  2. Eye Tracking
  3. Focus of Attention
  4. Mind Wandering
  5. Virtual Reality

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