Talking on the Phone While Driving: A Literature Review on Driving Simulator Studies

Distracted driving is a growing concern around the world and has been the focus of many naturalistic and simulator-based studies. Driving simulators provide excellent practical and theoretical help in studying the driving process, and considerable efforts have been made to prove their validity. This research aimed to review relevant simulator-based studies focused on investigating the effects of the talking-on-the-phone-while-driving distraction on drivers’ behavior. This work is a scoping review which followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. The search was performed on five databases, covering twenty years of research results. It was focused on finding answers to three research questions that could offer an overview of the main sources of distraction, the research infrastructure, and the measures that were used to analyze and predict the effects of distractions. A number of 4332 studies were identified in the database search, from which 83 were included in the review. The main findings revealed that TPWD distraction negatively affects driving performance, exposing drivers to dangerous traffic situations. Moreover, there is a general understanding that the driver’s cognitive, manual, visual, and auditory resources are all involved, to a certain degree, when executing a secondary task while driving.