Attending to the peripheral world while driving

Do inexperienced drivers see less of the world when driving? Previous research suggests that participants detect fewer peripheral targets while watching video clips of dynamic hazardous driving scenes due to increases in foveal demand (i.e. the presence of a hazard), increases in peripheral target eccentricity, and the lack of driving experience. The current study aimed to further explore the role of experience as a key factor in the potential narrowing of spatial attention, and the possibility of differences in the time course of attentional deployment. It was predicted that the amount of narrowing due to central processing demands would change as a function of driving experience, with more experienced drivers suffering less narrowing due to their mastery of central processing demands in road scenes. The data did not support the narrowing hypothesis, though they did support the alternative strategic difference between the driver groups in the time-course of attentional deployment. Learners seem to suffer attentional degradation in extra-foveal regions over a longer period of time whereas experienced drivers seem to invest peripheral attention at the hazard location in short but intense bursts. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.