The Thresholds of Greening Unit Serving Set as an Arousal Task Based on EEG and Eye Movement
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-515733/v1
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 the use of roadside greening units as arousal tasks to counteract driver monotony and fatigue on prairie highways. Monotonous road environments reduce driver vigilance and increase the risk of accidents, particularly among young novice drivers. While previous research suggests that alertness-maintaining tasks can interrupt monotony, these are often technology-dependent. This paper hypothesizes that natural landscapes can serve as effective, passive arousal tasks by increasing visual stimuli, but that their effectiveness is limited by habituation and specific spatial thresholds. The research aims to determine the optimal arousal levels, effective lengths, and spatial patterns of greening units using electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movement metrics. The experiment involved 26 male novice drivers aged 20–25 participating in a simulated driving study using a high-fidelity 6-DOF driving simulator. Participants drove through four distinct virtual landscape scenes: a control group with no greening, and three experimental groups featuring different shrub arrangements (linear closed, triangular closed, and fully open triangular). EEG data were recorded from the occipital-parietal region to measure alpha, beta, and theta wave powers, while eye movements were tracked to record fixation, saccade, blink duration, and pupil diameter. The study analyzed the correlation between alpha power and eye movement types to distinguish between external (retinal) and internal (extra-retinal) oculomotor control, using sample entropy and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis to determine thresholds for effective greening length. The results demonstrate that greening units significantly improve driver vigilance and promote external eye movement control compared to the control group. Alpha power was found to be significantly correlated with fixation duration and pupil diameter, validating its use as an indicator for distinguishing eye movement control types. The study identified that a fully open triangular landscape provides the superior arousal effect. Specifically, the optimal arousal length for greening units was determined to be 666 meters. The effective lengths varied by landscape type: 1,333 meters for closed linear landscapes, 3,333 meters for closed triangular landscapes, and 13,333 meters for fully open triangular landscapes. Furthermore, an alpha sample entropy threshold of less than 0.234 was established as a reliable metric for identifying the effective length of greening units, with an ROC analysis accuracy of 90.9%. These findings provide empirical evidence that roadside greening can function as an effective arousal task to mitigate monotony-induced vigilance decline. The study establishes specific design thresholds for highway landscaping, suggesting that fully open triangular configurations are most effective for maintaining driver alertness over longer distances. By defining the alpha sample entropy threshold, the research offers a quantifiable method for determining the adequate length of greening units based on landscape spatial patterns. This contributes to traffic safety engineering by providing data-driven guidelines for landscape design on monotonous highways, helping to ensure drivers maintain sufficient external visual attention to handle unpredictable events.
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 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 11 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- vigilance
- eye movements scanning
- drowsiness
- drowsiness detection algorithms
- useful field of view
- gaze based attention detection
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
- Methodological Resource: tool software
- Theoretical Contribution: theory or model