Neural Correlates of Simulated Driving While Performing a Secondary Task: A Review

Abstract

Distracted driving consists in performing a secondary task while driving, such as cell-phone conversation. Given the limited resources of the attentional system, engaging in a secondary task while driving increases the risk to have car accidents. The secondary task engagement while driving can depend on or be affected by different factors, including driver's individual characteristics, necessities, environmental conditions, and so forth. In the present work, the neuroimaging studies that investigated the brain areas involved in simulated driving during the execution of a secondary task (visual and overall auditory tasks) were reviewed in light of driving settings. In general, although there are also differences in decrease and increase brain activations across studies, due to the varieties of paradigms used (simulators, secondary tasks and neuroimaging techniques), the dual-task condition (simulated driving plus secondary task), as compared to the simulated driving-alone condition, was generally found to yield a significant shift in activations from occipital to fronto-parietal brain regions. These findings show that when a secondary task is added during driving the neural system redirects attentional resources away from visual processing, increasing the possibility of incorrect, dangerous or risky behavioral responses. The shift of the attentional resources can occur even if driving behavior is not explicitly affected. Limits of the neuroimaging studies reviewed and future research directions, including the need to explore the role of personality factors in the modulation of the neural programs while engaging distracted driving, are briefly discussed.

Spatial Mental Transformation Skills Discriminate Fitness to Drive in Young and Old Adults

“…More specifically, general cognitive functions, considered accurate predictors of driving performance, include attention, executive functioning, memory, logic reasoning, psychomotor abilities, and visuospatial skills (Reger et al, 2004;Uc et al, 2006b;Sommer et al, 2008;Mathias and Lucas, 2009;Aksan et al, 2015;Overton et al, 2015;Zicat et al, 2018;Palmiero et al, 2019). Each driving sub-task requires a combination/integration of cognitive domains, which have to process a wide range of sensory information in order to safely manage the vehicle and to deal with hazards.…”

An interrater reliability study of gait analysis systems with the dual task paradigm in healthy young and older adults

“…Second, decrements in physical activity at this age means that multiple-task performance may no longer be a prominent feature of everyday activities [ 3 , 4 ] and therefore, with the lack of practice, performance declines. Thus, for example, changes in the gait pattern while dual tasking can lead to injourious falls [ 5 ] or serious traffic accidents [ 6 ], if the attentional resources are not sufficient to process environmental conditions (e.g., a car coming up to cross the road [ 7 ];). Dual tasking describes the simultaneous processing of two tasks.…”

Regulating road rage

“…One of the few studies evaluating emotion regulation monitoring interventions includes a recent laboratory study that provided participants with real‐time information of their brain activity (Zich et al., 2020). This study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging‐based neurofeedback, a type of intervention that could be a valuable addition to the growing body of studies assessing neural correlates in simulated driving contexts (Palmiero et al., 2019).…”