WHEN and WHERE: Thursday, April 11, 2019, 12-1pm; KEATS room (Psychology building)
Biography
David Strayer is the John R.
Park professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the
University. He received his Ph.D. from
the University of Illinois@ Urbana-Champaign in 1989 and worked at GTE
laboratories before joining the faculty at the University of Utah. Dr. Strayer’s research examines attention and
multitasking in real-world contexts such as driving an automobile. He has published over 175 scholarly articles
in this area and for the last 15 years has focused on understanding driver
distraction stemming from multimodal interactions in the vehicle.
Talk: Emerging Technologies Influencing
Distracted Driving
Driver distraction is increasingly
recognized as a significant source of injuries and fatalities on the roadway.
Driver distraction can arise from visual/manual interference, for example when
a driver takes his or her eyes off the road to interact with a device.
Impairments also stem from cognitive sources of distraction when attention is
diverted from safely operating the vehicle.
Concern over distracted driving is growing as more and more wireless
devices are being integrated into the vehicle. Working with AAA Foundation
for Traffic Safety, we developed, validated, and applied a metric of
distraction associated with the diversion of attention from driving. Our
studies show that the distraction potential can be reliably measured, that
cognitive workload systematically varies as a function of the secondary task
performed by the driver, and that many activities, particularly complex
multimodal interactions in the vehicle, are associated with surprisingly high
levels of mental workload. Using the new
technology in the vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely
affect traffic safety.
