Name: driving under the influence: how music listening affects driving behaviors
Uploaded: 2019-03-27T13:00:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Driving Under the Influence: How Music Listening Affects Driving Behaviors at JoVE.com

This study was supported by the LABEX CORTEX (ANR-11-LABX-0042) of Universit&#233; de Lyon, within the program &#8216;&#8216;Investissements d&#8217;Avenir&#8217;&#8217; (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) operated by the French National Research Agency (ANR).

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
<ol>
	<li>Ensure that participants have a driving license and at least two years of driving experience.</li>
	<li>Ensure that participants have normal or corrected t...

<ol>
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R., Underwood, G. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Visual+search+of+driving+situations:+Danger+and+experience.">Visual search of driving situations: Danger and experience.</a> Perception. 27 (8), 951-964 (1998).</li><li>Russell, J. A. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=A+Circumplex+Model+of+Affect.">A Circumplex Model of Affect.</a> Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 39 (6), 1161-1178 (1980).</li><li>Russell, J. A. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Core+affect+and+the+psychological+construction+of+emotion.">Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion.</a> Psychological review. 110 (1), 145-172 (2003).</li><li>Posner, J., Russell, J. A., Peterson, B. 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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...

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 crucial individual and social activity. Based on an exhaustive literature review, Sch&#228;fer et al.4 found about 130 different non-redundant functions associated to music listening and three music listening meta-functions were then identified: (1) arousal and mood regulation, (2) self-awareness achievement, and (3) social relatedness expression. As a consequence, people are frequently listening to music in a variety of situations and locations5. Among those situations, listening to music while driving is extremely common with drivers reporting listening to music during about three quarters of their driving time6.
Music listening is known to impact the listener&#8217;s emotional state7 and thus to induce mood changes in a variety of situations and research areas8. According to the mood congruency theory, a person&#8217;s behavior is related to his/her mood9 with evidence gained from both neuroimaging10 and behavioral experiments11. Following this rationale, music listening can change drivers&#8217; mood, which in turn can change driving behaviors.
Musically-induced mood changes while driving were found to result in performance improvements under certain conditions or impairments under other conditions. On the one hand, in complex and highly demanding driving environments, calm music was found to mitigate affective states:&#160; it has a softening effect on negative emotions, reduces the level of stress, and improves driver&#8217;s relaxation and calm12. This relaxing effect was reported to be more efficient when using abrupt music changes compared to gradual music changes13. On the other hand, people were slower to detect hazards in driving scenes when anger was previously induced through music and guided imagery compared with neutral mood performances14. Happy music listening while driving was also found to be detrimental to lateral control efficiency, while sad music had no significant effect on lateral control of the vehicle15. In brief, drivers&#8217; mood can impact driving performances in opposite ways depending on the music and associated mood induction and on the driving situation considered.
The purpose of the method reported here is to offer an experimentally well-controlled driving situation to investigate the impact of music listening on driving behaviors. To ensure the reproducibility of the driving situation, a method based on driving simulation has been implemented. At the first glance, a driving simulation might be considered as a degraded version of real driving investigations. However, the reality is more complex, and a given experimental setup cannot be considered as the best experimental solution in absolute terms. Rather the best experimental setup is the one that suits the most accurately the needs of the investigation concerned16. If real car-driving is the experimental setup that best reproduces the everyday life driving situations, it also comes with some drawbacks: driver safety in case of experimental manipulations, potential impairments in terms of driving performances, and difficulties in the control of the driving environment, including traffic, weather conditions, light conditions, level of ambient noise, etc. Conversely, if driving simulators are not as realistic as real vehicles, experimental conditions and manipulations can be strictly controlled and replicated17. As a result, different participants can be exposed to the exact same experimental conditions. In addition, experimental manipulations potentially impairing driving performances are made possible as only virtual safety (and not real safety) is engaged. Altogether, a driving simulation offers an excellent compromise between the need to conserve the driving activity natural (i.e., external validity) and the need for a strong experimental control (i.e., internal validity).

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	</colgroup>
	<tbody>
		<tr height="33">
			<td height="33" style="height:33px;width:216px;">Audacity software</td>
			<td style="width:271px;">Audacity</td>
			<td style="width:115px;">Open source</td>
			<td style="width:435px;">https://www.audacityteam.org</td>
		</tr>
		<tr height="21">
			<td height="21" style="height:21px;width:216px;">Driving simulator</td>
			<td style="width:271px;">Universit&#233; de Sherbrooke</td>
			<td style="width:115px;">BB sim</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr height="42">
			<td height="42" style="height:42px;width:216px;">Polar watch with heart rate monitor</td>
			<td style="width:271px;">Polar</td>
			<td style="width:115px;">RC3</td>
			<td>https://www.polar.com/fr</td>
		</tr>
		<tr height="21">
			<td height="21" style="height:21px;width:216px;">Speakers</td>
			<td style="width:271px;">Yamaha</td>
			<td style="width:115px;">MSP3</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr height="21">
			<td height="21" style="height:21px;width:216px;">Steering wheel and pedals</td>
			<td style="width:271px;">Logitech</td>
			<td style="width:115px;">G27</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

driving under the influence: how music listening affects driving behaviors

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.

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...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Driving Under the Influence: How Music Listening Affects Driving Behaviors at JoVE.com

Driving Under the Influence: How Music Listening Affects Driving Behaviors

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.

Car driving is a daily activity for many individuals in modern societies. Drivers often listen to music while driving. The method presented here ...

This protocol offers a well controlled car driving situation, where participants have to continuously adjust their vehicle speed according to lead vehicle speed. Driving in a simulator is different from driving in real life. All the events inside the simulation have been planned and are under control.The main advantage of the driving simulation is to provide the same driving condition to different participants, and to be sensitive to inter-individual differences and individual variation from one completion of the protocol to the other. The driving situations have to be carefully thought out well in advance. They also need to be tested by a few pilot participants.The analyses also need to be computed beforehand, which indicators are we gonna compute, and how do we perform the computation. Demonstrating the procedure will be Vivien Gaujoux, a research engineer in my laboratory. Begin by escorting the participant into the experimental room.Ensure that they have a driving license, at least years of driving experience, normal or corrected to normal vision and audition. Have the participant provide a USB stick with pre-selected preferred music tracks to create different musical backgrounds during the experiment. Then equip the participant with a heart rate belt linked to a watch that monitors heart rate.Next, seat the participant in front of the simulator in a modified car seat, approximately 60 centimeters from the screens. Allow the participant to adjust the distance between the seat and the pedals with the handle underneath the seat. Once the participant is comfortably positioned, provide instructions on using the features of the simulator.Then inform the participant about simulation sickness that can sometimes occur, and let the participant know that the simulation will be stopped at any time if necessary. On the computer screen, show rural roadway with one traffic lane per direction with five left-bends and five right-bends, and without any traffic. Set the simulation driving noise at 25 decibels.Next, modify the tempo of the music without any pitch modification. Create four auditory backgrounds for the participant:no music, music, music plus 10, and music minus 10. Next, set the intensity of the music to 75 decibels for all auditory backgrounds, except for the no music condition.Finally, use the software to play one of the four musical backgrounds on two lateral powered monitor speakers located on the right and left of the participant for the entire duration of each experimental drive. Start by providing instructions about the experimental task to the participant. Inform them to drive as if in a real-life situation, and that there is no traffic or obstacles on the path.Then start the simulation with the training phase in order to familiarize the participant with the driving simulator, the simulated environment, the vehicle controls, and the car-following task. When the participant feels comfortable, stop the training phase. Next, launch the simulated car-following task and one of the four musical backgrounds.For the simulated car driving task, have the driver first drive for 50 meters before stopping at a stop sign. Once the participant's vehicle has stopped, a leading vehicle appears on the road at the left of the intersection. Instruct the participant to follow the vehicle.After an initial phase in which the speed of the leading vehicle is stationary and set at 20 kilometers per hour, allow the driven vehicle to catch up. Watch the participant keep driving as the speed then varies sinusoidally between 45 kilometers per hour and 70 kilometers per hour within each period of 60 seconds, for a total of three minutes. Then ask the participant to stop driving.For the car-following task, use a two-lane road with opposite traffic directions. In order to provide a realistic driving environment, use a road section with a balanced number of left and right bends, with various radii of curvature from 45 meters to 300 meters. Additionally, add visual elements on the edges of the road section, such as trees, barriers, fields, and landform.Record heart rate data at the beginning of each simulated car-following task, and end it at the end of that driving task. Lastly, allow the participant to take a five-minute break between each car-following task to reduce carryover effects. After the experiment, collect the participant's subjective mood using the Brief Mood Introspection Scale.Next, compute the mean heart rate and heart rate variability over the entire drive for each experimental condition using the data recorded by the heart rate monitoring watch at a sample per second. Then measure objective driving behaviors through the mean inter-vehicular time and the inter-vehicular time variability. Record both driven and leading vehicle position, and speed at each time step, at a sample rate of 60 hertz.At each time step, compute the inter-vehicular time as the time required for the driven vehicle to reach the position of the lead vehicle, if the position of the lead vehicle was frozen, and the speed of the driven vehicle was constant. Finally, average all the values collected for a drive to obtain the mean inter-vehicular time, and compute the standard deviation on those values to obtain the inter-vehicular time variability. Results indicated that the music condition had a significant effect on subjective mood as observed on three of the four dimensions of the Brief Mood Introspection Scale when compared with the no music condition.Considering all four auditory backgrounds, a significant effect on subjective mood was observed on the four dimensions of the BMIS. The mean heart rate was significantly different for the no music and music backgrounds, and was significantly different under the four auditory background conditions as well. The heart rate variability was not significantly impacted by the background condition in either case.Further, the mean inter-vehicular time was significantly different for the no music and music backgrounds, but was not significantly different under the four auditory background conditions. The standard deviation of the inter-vehicular time was not significantly impacted by the background condition in either case. The instructions delivered to participants are crucial for the success of the protocol.The experimenter must ensure that participants understand that they should follow the lead vehicle as they would do in real life. The procedure presented does not cover the entire range of possible driving situations. The car-following task can be complemented by the investigation of other driving situations, such as driving on a highway, or in town, for instance.The main advantage of the driving simulation is the safety offered to the participant compared to real-life driving. However, since some participants may experience motion sickness, we recommend stopping the simulation as soon as the participant feels dizzy.

Research

JoVE Journal

Behavior

Methods to Explore the Influence of Top-down Visual Processes on Motor Behavior

Kinesthetic awareness is important to successfully navigate the environment. When we interact with our daily surroundings, some aspects of movement are ...

Irrelevant Stimuli and Action Control: Analyzing the Influence of Ignored Stimuli via the Distractor-Response Binding Paradigm

Selection tasks in which simple stimuli (e.g. letters) are presented and a target stimulus has to be selected against one or more distractor stimuli are ...

Uncovering Beat Deafness: Detecting Rhythm Disorders with Synchronized Finger Tapping and Perceptual Timing Tasks

A set of behavioral tasks for assessing perceptual and sensorimotor timing abilities in the general population (i.e., non-musicians) is presented here ...

Applying Stereotactic Injection Technique to Study Genetic Effects on Animal Behaviors

Stereotactic injection is a useful technique to deliver high titer lentiviruses to targeted brain areas in mice. Lentiviruses can either overexpress or ...

Assessing the Effects of Music Listening on Psychobiological Stress in Daily Life

Music listening is associated with stress-reducing effects. However, most of the results on music listening and stress were gathered in experimental ...

How to Use the H1 Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Coil for Conditions Other than Depression

Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) is a relatively new technique that uses different coils for the treatment of different neuropathologies. The ...

Using Wavelet Entropy to Demonstrate how Mindfulness Practice Increases Coordination between Irregular Cerebral and Cardiac Activities

In both the East and West, traditional teachings say that the mind and heart are somehow closely correlated, especially during spiritual practice. One ...

The Other End of the Leash: An Experimental Test to Analyze How Owners Interact with Their Pet Dogs

It has been suggested that the way in which owners interact with their dogs can largely vary and influence the dog-owner bond, but very few objective ...

Assessment of Social Transmission of Food Preferences Behaviors

Olfactory recognition deficits are suggested to be able to serve as clinical marker to differentiate Alzheimer&#39;s disease (AD) subjects from healthy ...