Driver ’s Attention during Monotonous Driving

1. Driver’s Attention during Monotonous Driving Roman Mouček, Jan Řeřicha University of West Bohemia Pilsen, Czech Republic

2. Introduction • Why • Attention of drivers – road safety • Decline of attention is natural • What: • Investigation of driver’s attention during monotonous driving • How: • Electric activity of human brain • Technique of event related potentials (ERP) • ERP experiment based on auditory stimulation • Results

3. Attention of drivers • Long rides • Monotonous driving – motorways • Not focused on prolongation of driver’s reactions • EEG (electrophysiology) vs. ERP (event related potential) • Auditory stimulation during monotonous drive – changes in the peak latency of the P3 component

4. Hypothesis • Peal latency of the P3 component increases in time as the driver is more tired from monotonous drive

5. ERP and P3 Component • Advantages compared to behavior techniques • Which stages of processing are influenced by experimental manipulation • Online measure of the processing of stimuli • P3 component • depends entirely on the task performed by the subject • Sensitive to variety of factors • Related to process called “context updating” • sensitive to the probability of the target stimulus.

6. P3 amplitude • P3 amplitude • increases when the probability of the target stimulus class decreases • becomes larger when it is preceded by a greater number of non-target stimuli • is larger when the subject pays more attention to a task • is smaller if the subject does not know whether a given stimulus is / is not a target

7. P3 latency • associated with stimulus categorization • If stimulus categorization is postponed, P3 latency is increased • While P3 latency depends on the time required to stimulus categorization it does not depend on consequent processes (e.g. response selection) • can be used to determine if a performed experiment influences the processes of stimulus categorization or processes related to a response

8. Experiment - Objectives • To construct a highly monotonous track where a substantial decrease of attention is supposed. • To design and implement a common auditory ERP experiment. • To perform the ERP experiment on the group of tested subjects. • To divide the drive into time intervals of the same length and compare the latency of the averaged P3 components in these time intervals. • To evaluate results to confirm/reject the hypothesis.

9. Laboratory

10. Laboratory

11. Track

12. Laboratory - metadata • Hardware equipment • Software tools • Recording System • Tested subjects • Course of experiments • Environment • Data and metadata storage

13. Recording system • 10-20 system • The cap reference electrode used first, then reference electrode was placed above the nose

14. Tested subjects • A group of 14 men • university students, aged 21-23, • All of them were right-handed, no visual or auditory defects. • All of them had a driving license

15. Course of experiment • Preparation phase • standard biorhythms • not to drink any stimulating substances and alcoholic beverages • to come not exhausted. • familiarized with the basic behavioral rules during an EEG/ERP experiment • …. • Experiment - 40 minutes • Closing phase - several questions related to subjects’ feeling of tiredness

16. Data processing • Data import • Data filtering • Rejection of corrupted data • Data selection • Channels selection • Extraction of epochs • Baseline correction • Data averaging

17. Results

18. Results – cap reference, Cz electrode

19. Results – nose reference, Cz electrode

20. Conclusion • P3 component was found • prolongation of peak latency over time could not be clearly observed • long target stimulus stretched the length of the component - stretched components are worse analyzable - absolute coordinates are distorted. • not many of target stimuli because of frequent removal of the artifacts • this kind of attention decline did not affect peak latency of the P3 component.

21. Thank you for your attention