Makes sense! I guess I wonder if there’s a literature on the cause of sleep deprivation induced car accidents, eg whether the problem is only microsleeps or whether things like impulsivity or reaction time also contribute.
Basically, in these driving simulations, reaction time and breaking time is significantly affected by sleep deprivation. I’m not sure how this could all be due to microsleeps. And it seems quite plausibly related to both risk of car accident and cognitive performance more broadly.
whether the problem is only microsleeps or whether things like impulsivity or reaction time also contribute.
There’s a thing called the Psychomotor Vigilance Task, which when I did it during a sleep deprivation experiment (ten years ago) showed both an increase in reaction time and increase in ‘lapses’ (not responding to the light quickly enough). I suspect that worse reaction time would contribute significantly (note that responding to things later means you need to respond to them more harshly, which causes problems of its own).
Makes sense! I guess I wonder if there’s a literature on the cause of sleep deprivation induced car accidents, eg whether the problem is only microsleeps or whether things like impulsivity or reaction time also contribute.
ETA: Preliminary search: the first Google result found this study: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-09095-5
Basically, in these driving simulations, reaction time and breaking time is significantly affected by sleep deprivation. I’m not sure how this could all be due to microsleeps. And it seems quite plausibly related to both risk of car accident and cognitive performance more broadly.
There’s a thing called the Psychomotor Vigilance Task, which when I did it during a sleep deprivation experiment (ten years ago) showed both an increase in reaction time and increase in ‘lapses’ (not responding to the light quickly enough). I suspect that worse reaction time would contribute significantly (note that responding to things later means you need to respond to them more harshly, which causes problems of its own).