Digital billboards advertisements’ effects on drivers’ performance and attention.

Abstract

There is increasing interest in attempting to reduce the problem of driver distraction with the aim of decreasing the rate of road accidents and improving road traffic safety. Many existing work in the literature focuses on distraction caused from within the vehicle; however, the surrounding driving environment might also impair the driver’s attention to the road. One of the main sources of outside distraction is the presence of digital billboard advertisements (DBAs) on roads and highways, especially as many of them are transitioning between different advertisements or are animated. The goal of this study was to analyze the effects of different types of DBAs on drivers’ performance and attention. To this end, 100 students participated in a controlled driving simulator experiment in an urban environment. Measures of performance and attention were collected using eye tracking, EEG, simulator measures, and subjective evaluations. The different types of DBAs investigated were: static (single image advertisement), transitioning (two transitioning advertisements), and animated (short videos). The statistical analysis demonstrated that there were statistical differences in the effect of each format of DBA on drivers' performance (deviation from the center of the lane and reaction time), visual attention to the road (percent fixations on the road, percentfixation on DBAs, fixation duration on DBAs, and number of gazes on DBAs), and the theta band and beta band powers of the frontal cortex. Supervised and unsupervised machine learning models were used to detect driver distraction caused by DBAs. The results of this study will provide guidelines and recommendations for the better design and regulation of DBAs in order to minimize driver distraction. The results can also provide a building block for an in-vehicle intelligent system based on eye tracking and EEG that can detect distraction due to DBAs and warn the driver accordingly or activate self-driving mode.