Evaluation of Effect of Total Awake Time on Driving Performance Skills – Hazard Anticipation and Hazard Mitigation: A simulator study

摘要

Sleepy or drowsy drivers are much more at risk of being involved in a crash than drivers who arealert and vigilant. Although a large body of evidence has shown that sleepiness and drowsinessnegatively affect vehicle control measures, no study has yet shown how such factors affect higherlevel, driving related cognitive skills such as hazard anticipation and hazard mitigation. Theseskills are critical ones because they have consistently been found to correlate with traffic crashes.In this study, we investigated how prolonged Total Awake Time (TAT), a prominent contributorto sleepiness and drowsiness, affects these higher order cognitive skills. Forty-eight experienceddrivers completed two driving simulator evaluation sessions: pre-test and post-test. In each session,participants were asked to navigate a simulated world that included eight scenarios: four examineddrivers’ hazard anticipation abilities and four examined their hazard mitigation abilities. Whiledriving, all participants’ eye behaviors were measured. The results showed that drivers with thelonger average TAT performed poorer in both measures compared to drivers with the shorteraverage TAT. To conclude, increases in TAT were found to have a detrimental effect on bothhigher cognitive driving skills. The implications for policy are discussed.