The touchscreen in your car could be more distracting than you think.

      Recent research from the University of Washington (UW) and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) reveals that touchscreen interfaces in modern vehicles significantly impair both driving abilities and touchscreen accuracy, particularly under cognitive stress. This study comes at a time when automakers are replacing traditional knobs and buttons with large digital displays, prompting concerns regarding safety and driver focus.

      As touchscreen interaction and cognitive load increase, driving performance declines

      In the study, 16 participants were placed in a vehicle simulator equipped with a 12-inch central touchscreen. The researchers monitored eye movements, finger movements, pupil dilation, and electrodermal activity to gauge cognitive load. Participants were instructed to interact with on-screen targets while concurrently completing an N-back memory task designed to replicate the mental effort involved in navigating traffic, processing alerts, or interpreting roadside information.

      The results showed that multitasking negatively affected both driving and touchscreen performance. Drivers using the touchscreen swerved within their lane 42% more often, even before additional cognitive tasks were added. Touchscreen performance also deteriorated significantly: accuracy and speed decreased by 58% during driving, with an additional 17% decline under high mental load.

      Attention management worsened as well. With increased cognitive demands, each glance at the touchscreen became 26% shorter, indicating hurried or fragmented visual checks. Additionally, drivers tended to reach for the screen before glancing at it—the “hand-before-eye” ratio increased from 63% to 71% during memory tasks—likely leading to missed taps and longer visual searches.

      Interestingly, enlarging the on-screen touch targets did not yield any improvement.

      “The time-consuming factor is the visual search,” noted lead author Xiyuan Alan Shen. “Drivers’ hands often move before their eyes, so larger buttons do not resolve the fundamental issue.”

      The findings underscore a growing dilemma in automotive design: touchscreens provide flexibility, personalization, and modern aesthetics, yet they require significantly more visual and cognitive engagement from drivers compared to tactile controls. As dashboards increasingly resemble tablets, it raises the question of how much interaction is safe at highway speeds.

      The researchers suggest that future systems may need to incorporate built-in intelligence. Eye-tracking or steering-wheel sensors could identify when a driver is cognitively overloaded and automatically adjust the interface—by enlarging essential controls, simplifying menus, or delaying non-essential prompts until the driver can focus again.

      The research team shared their findings on September 30 at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Busan, Korea, emphasizing that this work lays the groundwork for designing safer in-car interfaces as touchscreens become ubiquitous in the industry.