An analysis of steering accuracy and eye movement properties under language fluent tasks

Abstract

In order to quantitatively evaluate the influence of voice operation, we measured the steering accuracy for the dynamic random pattern which abstracting the car driving with presence or absence of a verbal fluency task. We simultaneously measured the eye movements during this task, and evaluated the free-view gaze point distributions and characteristics of fixation eye movements. The results show that the steering error increases when performing the verbal fluency task, and the distributions of gaze points became locally restricted. Moreover, it indicates that in the case of maintaining gaze on the fixation crosshair, the degree of fixation instability increases, and also the number and amplitude of microsaccades increase when the verbal fluency task have applied. These results suggest that the influences on the steering accuracy caused by the verbal fluency tasks might be due to restriction of natural gaze behaviors and concentrations of attention to the visual target.