Metacognition and self‐regulation on the road: A qualitative approach to driver attention and distraction

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the self-regulatory experiences and perceptions of drivers' attentional processes on the road, via a metacognitive framework. A total of 46 Australian drivers participated in a phone interview and thematic analysis was applied to the data. The results revealed that effective self-reported attention regulation was perceptually contingent on: driving experience, metacognitive skills used to regulate attention, and strategies to sustain attention. The perceptual difficulty of driving environments was shown to impact on self-reported arousal, and thus the perceived ability to control and sustain attention. Similarly, cognitive confidence, and metacognitive beliefs about worry and mindless driving were shown to not only influence the tendency to engage in worry and mindless driving, but also the subjective ability to self-regulate attention whilst doing so. This study has provided evidence for the potential of metacognitive concepts to help better understand the process of attentional lapses and difficulties on the road.

Individual Variability in Brain Connectivity Patterns and Driving-Fatigue Dynamics

“…Although this is the case in real-word scenarios (shifting attentional control induced by additional activities, such as advanced road familiarization, listening to music or media, adjusting windows, readjusting sitting position, etc.) [ 36 ], our study aimed to assess mental fatigue, only focusing on experimental factors and thus excluding non-fatigue-related operations. From this standpoint, by exclusively estimating significant connections that exhibit an increasing or decreasing trend over the entire duration, we can avoid incorporating fatigue characteristics that could be internally regulated [ 11 ].…”

“…Although fatigue states exhibit notable differences compared to rested states, suggesting significant disparities [ 34 ], sustained attention during long-term driving does not always display monotonic development trends [ 35 ]. This is often attributed to factors irrelevant to mental fatigue such as shifts of attentional control induced by additional activities or unrelated visual and auditory stimuli [ 36 ].…”

Self-Regulation Phenomenon Emerged During Prolonged Fatigue Driving: An EEG Connectivity Study

“…In the current work, we defined it as the FSR of driving fatigue that is regulated autonomously and internally. That is, during the FSR, subject would recover the behavioral performance by spontaneously, passively, and without active human involvement to adjust itself to fatigue, which is unlike the self-regulation process in a recent work by Love and colleagues [45], where the self-regulation was caused by shift of attentional control through extra activities (including advance road familiarization, talking to oneself, listening to music or media, talking to others, opening windows, readjusting sitting position, etc). Heuristically, these activities were considered as intentionally attention-switch, which may lead to fatigue recovery in comparison with the passively FSR.…”