Abstract
Performance decrement associated with sleep deprivation is a leading contributor to traffic accidents and fatalities. While current research has focused on eye blink parameters as physiological indicators of driver drowsiness, little is understood of how gaze behaviour alters as a result of sleep deprivation. In particular, the effect of sleep deprivation on gaze entropy has not been previously examined. In this randomised, repeated measures study, 9 (4 male, 5 female) healthy participants completed two driving sessions in a fully instrumented vehicle (1 after a night of sleep deprivation and 1 after normal sleep) on a closed track, during which eye movement activity and lane departure events were recorded. Following sleep deprivation, the rate of fixations reduced while blink rate and duration as well as saccade amplitude increased. In addition, stationary and transition entropy of gaze also increased following sleep deprivation as well as with amount of time driven. An increase in stationary gaze entropy in particular was associated with higher odds of a lane departure event occurrence. These results highlight how fatigue induced by sleep deprivation and time-on-task effects can impair drivers’ visual awareness through disruption of gaze distribution and scanning patterns.
Highlights
An estimated 20–30% of all fatal road accidents are attributable to driver fatigue[1]
Gaze transition entropy may reflect task-related habitual sequences of glancing at specific areas of the visual field[40], which is shown to be affected by age[25], and according to our results, may be disrupted by sleep deprivation and task-induced fatigue to be more random than structured. These results suggest that sleep deprivation influenced visual scanning by reducing the rate of fixations, and by making their locations more spatially dispersed as well as altering the pattern of transitions between fixations to be more random than what is observed in the rested condition
Identifying key physiological indicators is a critical step towards the development of effective assessment methods and driver alerting systems to reduce fatalities associated with fatigued driving
Summary
An estimated 20–30% of all fatal road accidents are attributable to driver fatigue[1]. Examining changes in overall visual scanning behaviour may further elucidate how sleep deprivation affects driving performance by altering visual perception and attention. Gaze control involves higher-level processes to mediate the interaction between top-down assessment of specific task requirements and bottom-up response to stimuli saliency[22,23,24]. Such capacity to recruit a breadth of networks and cognitive processes makes www.nature.com/scientificreports/. In this case, indicates a wider distribution of fixations across the visual field, suggesting greater dispersion of gaze[29]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
