The effect of distraction on the detection of peripheral hazards to inform studies of road lighting to support drivers

Hazard detection is an important visual task when driving and, after dark, road lighting is used to support the performance of this task. Previous studies have tended to investigate the effect of changes in lighting on hazard detection but have not accounted for detection impairment due to cognitive distraction. As a precursor to testing the impact of distraction on hazard detection under different lighting conditions using a scale model road scene, this article reports an experiment conducted to investigate the degree to which distraction impairs detection performance, thus to validate the apparatus and experimental design. It was found that visual distraction led to significantly longer reaction times to the detection of three types of detection targets (a pedestrian, a road surface obstacle, and vehicle lane change) but that auditory distraction did not.