Measuring the Likelihood of Falling Asleep While Driving Using Psychophysics

Abstract

The current research aimed at developing a behaviorally based, subjective measure to assess the likelihood of falling asleep behind-the-wheel, using psychophysical scaling. Participants performed a simulated driving task and rated ease of falling asleep or ease of staying awake using magnitude estimation. The goal of this study was to test the applicability of magnitude estimation to the scaling of subjective state variables. Three male graduate students participated, performing six experimental sessions, half in the stay awake condition and half in the fall asleep condition. The results provide evidence that magnitude estimation was successfully implemented as a means to scale the ease of falling asleep and staying awake. During all sessions the logarithmic transformation of the magnitude estimation data was described by a significant linear function. The behaviorally-based subjective measure developed for this study was also shown to be predictive of performance in the driving simulator.