Driving Under the Influence: How Music Listening Affects Driving Behaviors

Summary

Here, we present a protocol to assess driving behaviors while following a vehicle in a simulated driving environment. The presented protocol is used to compare the impact of different auditory backgrounds on driving behaviors.

Abstract

Car driving is a daily activity for many individuals in modern societies. Drivers often listen to music while driving. The method presented here investigates how listening to music influences driving behaviors. A driving simulation was selected because it offers both a well-controlled environment and a good level of ecological validity. Driving behaviors were assessed through a car-following task. In practice, participants were instructed to follow a lead vehicle as they would do in real life. The lead vehicle speed changed over time requiring constant speed adjustments for the participants. The inter-vehicular time was used to assess driving behaviors. To complement the driving behaviors, the subjective mood and physiological level of arousal were also collected. As such, the results collected using this method offer insights on both the human internal state (i.e., subjective mood and physiological arousal) and driving behaviors in the car following task.

Introduction

Car driving activity has increased quickly over the last decades and is now a daily activity for many individuals in modern societies. In line with this growth, car-driving activity has become a hot topic of investigation for the human factor community¹.

There is an extremely limited number of major cultural activities that typically define humankind regardless of the population and the period of history considered². Music is one of these activities along with tool use and symbolic reasoning underpinning language abilities³. Playing and listening to music is therefore a....

Protocol

All methods described here have been approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology of University Lyon 2 and informed consent was obtained from all participants.

NOTE: Participants were recruited by means of notices posted in the local community and at the University.

1. Participants

1. Ensure that participants have a driving license and at least two years of driving experience.
2. Ensure that participants have normal or corrected to normal vision and audition.
3. Ensure that participants do not suffer from a mental illness (e.g., schizophrenia).
4. Recruit a simila....

Results

The main comparisons are based on the following experimental conditions. The first experimental condition is No Music versus Music, a comparison between the No Music background and the individual preferred Music background using a pairwise t-test. These analyses were meant to assess the influence of listening to preferred music compared to a control condition without music. The second experimental condition is four different musical backgrounds, a comparison between No Music, Music, Music +10 and Music -10 corre.......

Discussion

The proposed method is well suited for cognitive ergonomic investigations as it offers an excellent compromise between experimental control and ecological vailidity¹⁶. If a strong experimental control is required to ensure that the collected results are related to the experimental manipulations, no results are of interest if restricted to the experimental conditions. Indeed, scientific results are of interest if transferable to real life situations. These assertions do not mean that only real-life.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Audacity software	Audacity	Open source	https://www.audacityteam.org
Driving simulator	Université de Sherbrooke	BB sim
Polar watch with heart rate monitor	Polar	RC3	https://www.polar.com/fr
Speakers	Yamaha	MSP3
Steering wheel and pedals	Logitech	G27