Influence of Task Knowledge and Display Features on Driver Attention to Cluttered Navigation Displays

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effect of display clutter on driver attention allocation for highand low-clutter in-vehicle navigation displays. Participants were asked to respond to navigation queries in a static, presentation-based experiment and a dynamic, driving simulator experiment. Results revealed differential associations between clutter and attention allocation such that stronger correlations were exhibited in the presentation-based experiment. Those measures of display clutter focusing on display features and data (i.e., bottom-up factors) had stronger correlations with attention allocation than measures focusing on user task knowledge or familiarity (i.e., top-down factors). The findings suggest that humans adjust search strategies to account for competing demands of multiple tasks in such a way that any effect of clutter on driver attention is minimized, and that bottom-up influences of clutter have a stronger association with driver attention allocation than top-down influences.