ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates impairment of human psychomotor skills related to driving induced by fatigue alone and by the combined effects of fatigue and alcohol. Alcohol and fatigue have a common site of action in the central nervous system, the reticular activating system. The fatigue session was a 180-min three-way divided attention task consisting of a central pursuit tracking task, a secondary peripheral visual discrimination task and a random visual ‘emergency’ signal presented as a red light. In a questionnaire-based survey of truck drivers in Australia, 77.5 per cent of drivers rated fatigue as at least a substantial problem while 84.6 per cent of drivers reported experiencing fatigue, at least occasionally, while driving. An increased heart rate variability (HRV) has been demonstrated as a function of driving hours and fatigue and a decreased HRV has been shown to be associated with increasing information-processing load.
