Alertness Maintaining Tasks While Driving

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effectiveness of different alertness maintaining tasks on driver performance. Twelve professional truck drivers participated in five sessions of simulated driving. The first session consisted of driving without any alertness-maintaining tasks. In the following three sessions, three different alertness maintaining tasks were given during the drive. The fifth session consisted of driving while listening to music.

The analysis of the driving performance measures shows that overall alertness-maintaining tasks may have a positive effect on driving, by slowing performance deterioration and maintaining a higher level of alertness (measured by standardized HRV). Yet, not all tasks were equally demanding. Of the three tasks evaluated, the choice reaction time task was the least demanding and failed to prevent performance deterioration. A working memory task caused a decrement in longitudinal speed, perhaps indicating that it was too demanding for most drivers to perform while driving, and was subjectively evaluated by the drivers as the most detrimental task to the driving. A trivia game task did not show any advantage in preventing performance deterioration, but was preferred by 50% of the drivers over the other two tasks.