The prevalence of cognitive disengagement in automobile crashes

Abstract

Summary The current study analysed crashes identified in a large‐scale naturalistic driving database to assess the prevalence of cognitive disengagement (i.e., purely cognitive distraction and mind wandering/microsleep) or episodes wherein the driver did not look away from the roadway during secondary task completion or wherein another clearly observable contributing crash factor was not present, and the driver's reaction to the crash showed symptoms of cognitive disengagement. The study found that <1% (95% CI [0.45, 1.66]) of higher severity crashes had a potential contributing crash factor of mind wandering/microsleep; ~1.5% (95% CI [0.83, 2.32]) had a potential contributing factor of purely cognitive distraction. The results suggest a relatively low prevalence of cognitive disengagement among automotive crashes compared with visual/manual secondary tasks. However, the current methodology is limited in that it does not account for instances where cognitive disengagement, in combination with other factors, may have led to crashes, potentially leading to conservative estimates.

Understanding the domain of driving distraction with knowledge graphs

“…Essentially, driving distraction could be classified into "cognitive distraction", "visual distraction" and "manual distraction", which indicate "mind off the task", "eyes off the road" and "hands off the wheel" respectively, and many behaviors in real driving could be attributed to a combination of two or three categories [123]. As regards to the risk of these three distractions, plenty of studies proved that all of them could exert negative impacts [124,125], but there was also research suggesting that purely cognitive distraction did not increase accident rates obviously compared to normal driving [107,126]. Taking the cellphone as an example, using handheld cellphones and texting messages while driving, which involve more than one kind of distraction, have been proven to damage driving by numerous studies and forbidden by laws in most countries, whereas the use of hands-free cellphones, which involves cognitive distraction only, is often legally allowed and has remained controversial among researchers [107,127].…”