Active and passive fatigue in simulated driving: Discriminating styles of workload regulation and their safety impacts.
DOI: 10.1037/a0034386
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This research addresses the distinction between active and passive fatigue in driving, a critical safety issue often conflated in empirical studies. Motivated by the need to understand how different workload regulation strategies impact driver performance, the authors investigated whether task-induced fatigue manifests differently depending on whether it stems from cognitive overload (active) or underload/monotony (passive). The study aimed to validate specific driving simulator scenarios that induce these distinct states and to determine their respective effects on subjective psychological states, cognitive stress processes, and objective safety outcomes. The researchers conducted two studies using a driving simulator with undergraduate participants. Study 1 (N = 108) utilized a 3 (fatigue condition) × 3 (drive duration) between-subjects design. Active fatigue was induced by frequent wind gusts requiring constant steering corrections, while passive fatigue was induced by full vehicle automation requiring only monitoring. A control condition involved normal driving. Durations of 10, 30, and 50 minutes were tested. Measures included the Dundee Stress State Questionnaire (DSSQ) for subjective states, NASA-TLX for workload, and scales for appraisal and coping. Study 2 (N = 168) employed similar scenarios but added a performance assessment phase to measure alertness via braking and steering response speeds to emergency events, as well as crash probability. Results from Study 1 confirmed that the manipulations produced distinct psychological profiles. Active fatigue resulted in significantly higher mental workload, increased distress, and heightened emotion-focused coping, reflecting a state of strain and overload. In contrast, passive fatigue led to significantly lower workload, large declines in task engagement, reduced challenge appraisal, and increased avoidance coping, reflecting disengagement and underload. These effects accumulated over time. Study 2 revealed that only passive fatigue impaired safety-critical performance. Drivers experiencing passive fatigue showed significantly slower braking and steering responses to emergency events and a higher probability of crashes compared to those in active or control conditions. Active fatigue did not significantly impair these alertness measures, likely due to compensatory effort maintaining performance despite distress. The findings support theories viewing fatigue as an outcome of workload regulation strategies rather than a uniform state. The study demonstrates that while active fatigue is distressing, it does not necessarily degrade immediate safety performance due to maintained effort. Conversely, passive fatigue, often induced by automation, leads to dangerous disengagement and slowed reaction times. These results imply that automated driving systems may introduce specific safety risks by inducing passive fatigue, necessitating distinct countermeasures for underload-induced impairment compared to those for overload.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | OpenAlex-citations | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| archive | success | semantic_scholar | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-18 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-17 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-18 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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- Empirical Findings: physiological data
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