Cardiac autonomic control during simulated driving with a concurrent verbal working memory task.

Objective: The objective of the study was to illustrate sensitivity and diagnosticity differences between cardiac measures and lane-keeping measures of driving performance.

Background: Previous research suggests that physiological measures can be sensitive to the effects of driving and side task performance and diagnostic of the source of the attentional demands. We hypothesized that increases in side task difficulty would elicit physiological change without reduction of driving task performance and that the side task demands would elicit patterns ofautonomic activity that map to specific attentional processing resources.

Cardiac measures of driver workload during simulated driving with and without visual occlusion.

Cardiac (heart rate, pre-ejection period, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia), performance, and visual demand measures of driver workload were obtained from 15 male university students who drove a simulated course multiple times at a fixed speed of 72.4 km/h. The course contained curves of 3 different radii (582, 291, and 194 m) and was driven with and without visual occlusion of the road scene to manipulate driver workload.