Next-Day Effects of Social Drinking on Driver Fatigue and Driving Performance
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-88974-5_6
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)
Summary
This study investigates whether moderate social drinking, defined as reaching a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.05%, impairs driver fatigue and performance the following morning. While previous research has established that binge drinking causes next-day cognitive and psychomotor deficits, the impact of lower alcohol doses on driving safety remains unclear. The authors hypothesized that alcohol consumption would disrupt sleep quality, leading to increased daytime sleepiness and degraded driving performance. The researchers employed a within-subject experimental design involving 32 experienced male drivers. Participants completed two driving sessions in a fixed-base simulator: one morning after an evening of alcohol consumption (target BAC 0.05%) and another after a sober evening. Each session included a 35-minute drive comprising a monotonous rural road segment and a more complex urban scenario. Data collection utilized a multi-modal approach, including eye-tracking for attention and pupil diameter, electrocardiogram (ECG) for heart rate variability, electrooculogram (EOG) for blink metrics, and psychomotor vigilance tests (PVT). Subjective measures included sleep diaries and ratings of sleepiness on the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS). Statistical analysis used mixed-model ANOVA to compare performance indicators between the alcohol and control conditions. The results revealed a divergence between subjective and objective measures. Subjectively, participants reported higher sleepiness, felt less rested, and woke up more frequently after the alcohol condition. During driving, they rated themselves as more fatigued. However, objective performance metrics did not consistently support impaired driving. On the rural road, the control condition showed worse performance in lateral position variability and blink duration, while the alcohol condition showed elevated heart rate variability and attention levels, suggesting compensatory effort. On the urban road, no significant next-day differences were found except for carryover effects from the rural segment. Although some differences were statistically significant, the effect sizes were negligible, involving fractions of a KSS unit or centimeters of lateral deviation. The study concludes that a BAC level of 0.05% does not significantly influence next-day driving performance or fatigue after a full night’s sleep. The findings suggest that while drivers may subjectively feel more impaired, their objective performance remains comparable to sober conditions, potentially due to compensatory strategies. The authors note that these compensatory efforts could lead to overload during longer drives. They recommend further research with placebo controls, varied BAC levels, and extended driving durations to fully understand long-term fatigue risks.
Key finding
A blood alcohol concentration of 0.05% does not significantly impair next-day driving performance or sustained attention after a full night's sleep, despite subjective reports of increased fatigue.
Methodology
simulator
Sample size: 32
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-05 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-06 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-07 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-07 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-07 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-05 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: physiological data