Attentional control in accidents involving agricultural tractor operators

Feature at a glance: Although a lack of safety features is often reported as the most important factor in tractor accidents, an accident per se is the outcome of many elements, including the amount of attentional control operators exert over the driving task. The lack of active attentional control is sometimes referred as “absentmindedness,” and many studies have investigated this phenomenon as the expression of individual differences. The present retrospective study represents a first attempt at investigating the relation between lack of attention and tractor accidents in a large sample of operators. The results show that attentional control is involved in tractor accidents, which can be taken as evidence of habit effects in operating agricultural machinery: Lower attentional control is required in routine actions, which makes expert operators more exposed to the possibility of making (skill-based) errors. This finding leads to suggestions for the design of future systems.