This paper explores the effects of age, system experience, and navigation technique on driving, navigation performance, and safety for drivers who used TravTek, an Advanced Traveler Information System. The first two studies investigated various route guidance configurations on the road in a specially equipped instrumented vehicle with an experimenter present. The third was a naturalistic quasi-experimental field study that collected data unobtrusively from more than 1200 TravTek rental car drivers with no in-vehicle experimenter. The results suggest that with increased experience, drivers become familiar with the system and develop strategies for substantially more efficient and safer use. The results also showed that drivers over age 65 had difficulty driving and navigating concurrently. They compensated by driving slowly and more cautiously. Despite this increased caution, older drivers made more safety-related errors than did younger drivers. The results also showed that older drivers benefited substantially from a well-designed ATIS driver interface.
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Thomas A. Dingus received his Ph.D. (1987) degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech. He currently holds appointments at Virginia Tech as Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Director of the University Center for Transportation Research.
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Melissa C. Hulse received an M.S. (1988) degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She started and works for Performance and Safety Sciences. Inc.
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Michael A. Mollenhauer received his M.S. (1995) degree in industrial engineering from the University of Iowa. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in industrial engineering concentrating on human factors, also at the University of Iowa.
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Rebecca N. Fleischman earned her ph.D. in psychology from Tufts University studying human information processing. She was employed at General Motors Research and Development from 1989 to 1996. She is currently a private consultant in Portland. Oregon.
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Daniel V. McGehee holds an M.S. in human factors from the University of Idaho. He is currently a research associate in the Human Factors Research Group at the University of Iowa's Iowa Driving Simulator.
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Natarajan Manakkal received his B.S. degree from the University of Madras, Madras, India, in 1992 and is a graduate student in industrial engineering at the University of Iowa. He is currently working at Honda Research and Development in Torrence, California.
