5. Conclusions
Engagement with an auditory task whilst driving resulted in more stable lateral vehicle control and a reduction in gaze
dispersion around the road centre. The difficulty of the auditory task being undertaken interacted with these trends, but the
presence of a simulated hearing loss had no extraneous effect. Despite this, there was some evidence that auditory task performance
whilst driving suffered as a result of simulated hearing loss, suggesting that the use of auditory-based in-vehicle
systems may be problematic for hearing impaired individuals.
These outcomes suggest that a facet of hearing impairment not captured by the simulation technique used may be
responsible for some previously observed decrements in hearing impaired individuals’ driving performance. These factors
may be psychoacoustic phenomena associated with sensory hearing loss, or co-existing cognitive factors which were not
present in the study sample. Further work is required to confirm the findings of this study across a range of driving scenarios
and auditory tasks, and in order to establish the extent to which cognitive factors play a part in the driving performance
alterations of hearing impaired individuals. Work measuring other dependent variables which might be affected in hearing