Abstract
Mind wandering is a pervasive threat to transportation safety, potentially accounting for a substantial number of crashes and fatalities. In the current study, mind wandering was induced through completion of the same task for 5 days, consisting of a 20-min monotonous freeway-driving scenario, a cognitive depletion task, and a repetition of the 20-min driving scenario driven in the reverse direction. Participants were periodically probed with auditory tones to self-report whether they were mind wandering or focused on the driving task. Self-reported mind wandering frequency was high, and did not statistically change over days of participation. For measures of driving performance, participant labeled periods of mind wandering were associated with reduced speed and reduced lane variability, in comparison to periods of on task performance. For measures of electrophysiology, periods of mind wandering were associated with increased power in the alpha band of the electroencephalogram (EEG), as well as a reduction in the magnitude of the P3a component of the event related potential (ERP) in response to the auditory probe. Results support that mind wandering has an impact on driving performance and the associated change in driver’s attentional state is detectable in underlying brain physiology. Further, results suggest that detecting the internal cognitive state of humans is possible in a continuous task such as automobile driving. Identifying periods of likely mind wandering could serve as a useful research tool for assessment of driver attention, and could potentially lead to future in-vehicle safety countermeasures.
Highlights
Driver inattention is a frequent cause of automobile crashes and fatalities
The current study assessed the relationship between mind wandering and driving across 5 days, with the time of day for participation maintained over days within each participant
While a given participant returned at the same time of day for each of their five sessions, the time of day used between participants varied between the morning and afternoon due to participant scheduling availability
Summary
Driver inattention is a frequent cause of automobile crashes and fatalities. This issue has received considerable attention from the scientific community in recent years. Methods of detecting episodes of driver inattention in real-time hold promise for alleviating the human and economic costs of this safety critical issue. Drivers can be inattentive for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being distraction from mobile devices (Caird et al, 2008) or other external factors. Many distracted driving crashes occur in the absence of an obvious visual or manual distraction. Mind wandering has been suggested as a potential source of many of these distracted driving crashes
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