Effect of Chewing Gum on Prevention of Vigilance Decrement in Manual and Autonomous Driving

MOTOYA, Takahiro; MURATA, Atuso; DOI, Toshihisa · 2022 · Crossref

DOI: 10.5100/jje.58.2e1-03

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Summary

This study investigates whether chewing gum can mitigate vigilance decrement during prolonged driving, specifically comparing manual and autonomous driving conditions. The research is motivated by the safety risks associated with Level 2 and 3 autonomous vehicles, where drivers must maintain monitoring capabilities to safely take over control from the system. Since vigilance naturally declines over time, leading to missed obstacles and delayed responses, the authors sought to determine if gum chewing—a behavior known to improve concentration and relaxation—could sustain driver alertness during extended periods of operation. The experiment involved ten participants (eight men, two women, aged 21–24) with valid driver’s licenses. Using a driving simulator, participants completed four conditions in a randomized within-subjects design: manual driving with gum, manual driving without gum, autonomous driving with gum, and autonomous driving without gum. Each condition lasted 120 minutes. The primary task involved driving on a straight, three-lane road at 80 km/h. In manual conditions, participants controlled steering and acceleration; in autonomous conditions, they monitored the screen with hands on the wheel. The secondary task, used to measure vigilance, required participants to press a button on the steering wheel when the tail lights of an overtaking vehicle illuminated. Over 10 minutes, 300 vehicles appeared, with 16 randomly displaying tail lights for 0.2 seconds. Participants in the gum-chewing conditions were instructed to replace their gum every 15 minutes. The results, analyzed via three-way ANOVA, revealed significant interactions between time intervals and gum chewing for reaction times. Without gum, reaction times increased significantly over the 120-minute period. In contrast, gum chewing suppressed this increase, maintaining faster response times particularly in the 30–60 minute and 90–120 minute intervals. Regarding error rates, main effects for time and gum chewing were significant. Error rates increased over time in no-gum conditions for both driving modes. However, gum chewing significantly reduced the rise in error rates across all time blocks compared to the no-gum conditions. The data indicated that while vigilance declined in all scenarios, the decrement was substantially less severe when participants chewed gum. The study concludes that chewing gum effectively prevents vigilance decrement during long-duration driving by suppressing the deterioration of reaction speed and reducing error rates. The authors note that the effect appeared more pronounced in manual driving than in autonomous driving. These findings suggest that simple behavioral interventions like gum chewing can enhance driver monitoring performance, potentially improving safety during handover phases in semi-autonomous vehicles. Future research is recommended to verify these effects in more complex driving environments, such as curved roads.

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• vigilance

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• Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data