Presented at First international conference on driver distraction and inattention (DDI 2009), Gothenburg, Sweden, September 28-29, 2009

It is assumed that in driving with visual secondary task, attention is mainly controlled through top-down processes. They direct attention to previously selected, driving relevant parts of the environment. In a driving simulator study, the phenomenon of change blindness is used as a method to asses the focus of attention. In drives with defined and controlled situational circumstances, the hypothesis is studied that in driving with visual secondary tasks, drivers direct their driving related attention primarily to parts of the scene that are relevant for driving. The participants repeatedly approached intersections. During the approaches, a gaze pattern typical for driving with a visual secondary task was experimentally created through occlusion. Change blindness was measured for driving relevant as well as driving irrelevant vehicles. Results for N=16 subjects showed influence of relevance on the amount of change blindness.