Advanced Driving Hub

I think the wife would be more likely to use the butter to ease the insertion of the eggs into the husband's alternative orifice... pan included.

Pontoneer wrote: .

Oh , and if stopped at lights , or in a traffic jam , turn off your engine and you’re no longer ‘driving’ , therefore no offence in using a handheld device , but it is still best avoided . Still shows , though , that many don’t know the law .

IIAC the law states that you must be parked with the engine turned off.

Nigel.

Generally, for driving offences, driving includes being stationary in a situation where there will be a need to move on shortly. Unless stuck in a traffic jam that isn't going anywhere for a long time, simply being in traffic should suffice. I cannot see how turning the engine off could affect the need to move on.

Strangely Brown wrote:

waremark wrote:I did a mountain gliding course with a well known expert in the field. He thought it was important to continually calculate the height at which you would arrive at the next mountain peak or safe landing place. He recommended developing one's ability to do this by regularly practicing mental arithmetic while driving. I was horrified at this, because for me practicing mental arithmetic is a major distraction from the driving task.

I saw an example test once, used to demonstrate how mental distraction *really* buggers up driving. It was a traffic officer asked to drive through a coned course as quickly as possible without hitting any cones. The first run through was, as expected, completely clean. On the second run he was asked to to the same again but this time count aloud, backwards from 100 in increments of 7s. It was not very far into the course before hitting the first cone and it went downhill from there.

The correct way for the traffic officer to approach this would be to prioritise the driving - ie do the backwards counting really badly/slowly or not at all if that is justified by the driving situation. The same applies to driving whilst using a hands free mobile phone, listening to the radio, talking to a passenger or looking at the scenery.
The backwards counting exercise might have been perfectly safe on a quiet motorway with a deliberately extended separation distance, as would answering a call about what time you expect to arrive. Equating complex multi-tasking with every possible use of a hands free mobile phone seems over simplistic to me......

It may well be over simplistic, however it doesn't alter the fact that we have a finite amount of brain power and if it's being used for one thing it can't be used for something else.

Horse wrote:It may well be over simplistic, however it doesn't alter the fact that we have a finite amount of brain power and if it's being used for one thing it can't be used for something else.

But, equally, it may well be over simplistic to assume that spare brain power enough to handle a short simple call is never possible while driving, specifically, that the driving task takes up all our brain power all of the time. If that were really the case the IAM and RoADAR wouldn't promote commentary as part of the skill set, nor would we expect police officers to communicate with others while driving.

I can't post a link to it right now, but I'm fairly sure that I've seen research to suggest that commentary is good for training purposes but can be counterproductive at times of high workload.

Not the one I was thinking of, but interesting none the less.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10. ... 0817690639




Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
Effects of Cognitive Load on Driving Performance: The Cognitive Control Hypothesis

Objective:
The objective of this paper was to outline an explanatory framework for understanding effects of cognitive load on driving performance and to review the existing experimental literature in the light of this framework.

Background:
Although there is general consensus that taking the eyes off the forward roadway significantly impairs most aspects of driving, the effects of primarily cognitively loading tasks on driving performance are not well understood.

Method:
Based on existing models of driver attention, an explanatory framework was outlined. This framework can be summarized in terms of the cognitive control hypothesis: Cognitive load selectively impairs driving subtasks that rely on cognitive control but leaves automatic performance unaffected. An extensive literature review was conducted wherein existing results were reinterpreted based on the proposed framework.

Results:
It was demonstrated that the general pattern of experimental results reported in the literature aligns well with the cognitive control hypothesis and that several apparent discrepancies between studies can be reconciled based on the proposed framework. More specifically, performance on nonpracticed or inherently variable tasks, relying on cognitive control, is consistently impaired by cognitive load, whereas the performance on automatized (well-practiced and consistently mapped) tasks is unaffected and sometimes even improved.

The difference with commentary and other mental exercises is that commentary is related to the task of driving. That's why it is possible and beneficial. (See the other current topic about pointing out/describing each sign). Describing how to drive a different road to one you are on would be much much harder.

I'm not a psychologist, so am only guessing. Could the mental effort required to verbalise (and filter - there's no way we can say aloud everything we see) be where mental workload conflict occurs?