Detection of mind-wandering in driving: contributions of cardiac measurement and eye movements

1st International Neuroergonomics Conference, The Brain at work and in everyday life, PARIS, FRANCE, 06-/10/2016 - 07/10/2016In 2014 in France, there are still over 3,300 killed on our roads. Distraction and inattention are considered as contributing factors for these accidents. These two different states seem to have different negative impacts on drivers' behaviors but would be responsible for an equivalent part of accidents (Galéra et al, 2012). Distraction can be defined as a diversion of attention away from critical driving activities due to external elements (Regan et al, 2011), while inattention can be defined as an internal state resulting from an endogenous shift of attention (Lemercier and Cellier, 2008). The emergence of inattention state can be promoted by cognitive under vs overload or Mind-Wandering (MW). To improve road safety, it is essential to identify solutions to avoid the emergence of these two states. MW is defined as a shift in the contents of thought away from an ongoing task to self-generated thoughts and feelings leading to a perceptual decoupling corresponding to the disengagement of attention from perception (Smallwood and Schooler, 2015). It is a recurring phenomenon in daily living activities, since half of our thoughts are dedicated to MW (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010) and it also happen while driving (Berthié et al, 2015). MW is associated with a visual attention focused narrowly on the road ahead leading to a potential excess risk (He et al, 2011). MW could also decrease speed micro-regulations, led to less micro-regulation of vehicle lateral position (Lemercier et al, 2014) and could change different cardiac markers (Ottaviani et al, 2015). So, studying this phenomenon so as to limit its impacts on driving is therefore essential and seems to be promising using oculometric (Uzzaman and Joordens, 2011) and cardiac measurements (Gabaude et al, 2012). In this study, the objective was twofold: 1) To identify physiological changes associated with MW; 2) to explore the influence of MW on drivers' driving performances and visual strategies. For that, ECG and eye tracking were recorded during simulated driving sessions. Participants were asked to (a) think prospectively about innovation in specific areas and (b) self-report their MW episodes. A previous indicator showing that it is possible to detect cognitive effort using evoked cardiac response (Pepin et al, in press) will be tested to detect MW. Some first results have shown that gaze fixity rate was higher one second before the declaration of MW episodes. It is expected that complementary results could foster new MW objective indicators. This work was supported by IFSTTAR and the Valeo Innovation Challenge funds