Measuring linguistically-induced cognitive load during driving using the ConTRe task

Abstract

This paper shows that fine-grained linguistic complexity has measurable effects on cognitive load with consequences for the design of in-car spoken dialogue systems. We used synthesized German sentences with grammatical ambiguities to test the additional workload caused by human sentence processing during driving. For the driving task, we used the Continuous Tracking and Reaction (ConTRe) task, which we believe is suitable for the measurement of the fine-grained effects of linguistically-related workload phenomena in automotive environments, as it provides millisecond-level driving deviation measurements on a continuous course. We applied the task in an eye-tracking environment, using a pupillometric measure of cognitive workload called the Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA).