Comparative study of the effects of auditory, visual and multimodality displays on drivers' performance in advanced traveller information systems

A simulator study was conducted to compare 16 younger (mean age 22 years) and 16 older (mean age 68 years) drivers' ratings of workload (time, visual, psychological stress) and performance of navigation and button-pushing (identification of vehicle or road hazards) tasks under both high- and low-load driving conditions when simple or complex advanced traveller information (ATI) was presented visually only, aurally only or by multimodality (visual and auditory) display. For all participants, both the auditory and multimodality displays produced better performance in terms of response times, total number of correct turns and subjective workload ratings than those of using the visual-only display. Participants using the multimodality display also made the fewest errors related to push-button and navigation tasks, and controlled their vehicles properly. The visual display led to less safe driving, apparently because it imposed higher demands on the drivers' attention. An age effect was found in the present study, with younger drivers performing better and reporting less stress than older drivers. Notably, however, use of the multimodality display significantly improved the older drivers' performance in the button-pushing task.