Driving is one of the most cognitively demanding everyday activities, requiring continuous coordination of perception (monitoring the road, other vehicles, signs), attention (maintaining vigilance while filtering distractions), decision-making (when to brake, change lanes, navigate), and motor control (steering, braking, accelerating). Because driving becomes partially automated through practice, drivers often underestimate its cognitive demands — creating a dangerous illusion of spare capacity that encourages multitasking.
Distraction Research
Cognitive psychology research has revealed the severe costs of driver distraction. Cell phone conversation (even hands-free) produces inattentional blindness — drivers look at but fail to see objects in their visual field, including pedestrians and red lights. Texting while driving requires visual, manual, and cognitive attention, producing impairment equivalent to or exceeding legal intoxication. The attentional blink and change blindness research explains why drivers can miss critical events during brief attentional lapses.
Wickens's multiple resource theory explains why some forms of multitasking while driving are more dangerous than others. Tasks that compete for the same attentional resources (visual-spatial) as driving produce more interference than tasks using different resources (auditory-verbal). However, even purely cognitive distraction (conversation) impairs driving by withdrawing attention from the driving task, as demonstrated by increased braking reaction times, reduced hazard detection, and narrowed useful field of view.
Implications
This research has informed distracted driving laws, vehicle interface design (minimizing visual-manual demands, using voice interfaces cautiously), and the development of driver monitoring systems that detect inattention. Autonomous vehicle design must account for the challenges of maintaining driver vigilance during partial automation — the "handoff problem" of transferring control from automated systems to inattentive humans.