<p>Following behavior is an indispensable part of vehicle driving, and the following behavior under visual and cognitive distraction has become one of the main causes of traffic accidents. The urban, rural, and expressway scenarios were constructed using the PanoSim platform, and experimental data were collected through a driving simulator to study the influence of combined cognitive and visual distraction on driving behavior. The results show that the steering wheel angle increased significantly with the increase of combined distraction, which leads to the weakened lateral stability. The compound distraction levels within the group (MID, MOD, SED) had a small impact on vehicle speed for urban or rural areas, yet a significant difference was obtained under residual light observation (RLO) and head turning observation (HTO) of expressway condition. Compared to RLO, the standard deviation of throttle opening in all three HTO conditions exhibited a marked improvement, which attributed to the dominated contribution from visual distraction rather than cognitive distraction. Moreover, the standard deviation of lateral position gradually increased with the increase of compound distraction levels in expressway scene. Therefore, it can be concluded that these results contribute a significant influence on development of distraction countermeasures and the design of in-vehicle systems.</p>