The saccadic training for driving safety

Abstract

Driving is not only a physical but also a mental task. Human errors such as misperception, information processing errors, and poor decision making are frequently identified as causes of accidents.

Objective: to reduce numbers of saccadic movements (SM) and antisaccadic movements (ASM) while driving because they involve a problem of visual perception. During each one of them, the visual scene sweeps across the retina with high-speed motion with an inevitable blurring of the image, as the retina is sweeping the visual field. Object positions in retinal coordinates change, the entire visual image is not updated and humans become effectively blind but usually we are not aware of this blur during the eye movement. Therefore, reducing the number of SM allows greater precision in visual information and thus increases safety.

Study Design: in collaboration with the Directorate of Specialties of the State Police of Italian Ministry of the Interior and the Autodrome of Modena we have submitted to saccadic training 23 policemen of Italian traffic police. We used Visual Exploration Training System (VET by SVEP^®) which consists in: personal computer, eyetracking system (120 Hz of frequency analisys) and new specific application software. Subjects were evaluated before and after 15 days of home training.

Results: In the overall 23 cases the training significantly reduced the number of SM in driving simulation.

Conclusions: our fast and easy-to-use method of saccadic training seems to be able to improve significantly both the function of visual exploration and the safety in driving.

Abbreviations

ADI: Number of saccades not directed towards the target point or rather attention deficit index; ASMs: anti-saccadic movements; AT: attentional test: the subject had to maintain fixation on a target point that appeared randomly on the monitor in 50 different positions in 50 s even during the recurrent appearance of new distracting images; CORSI: score of eCorsi Span Test; GROUP A and GROUP B: groups of policemen; ORD: ordinary road drivers; RD: racing drivers; RT: average start time of ocular movements; ST: saccade test: the subject had to fix a target point that appeared randomly on the monitor in 31 different positions in 23 s; SM: saccadic movements; ST: saccade test; TIME: the time on the lap during real driving; TRT: target reaching time; VET: visual exploration training system; VETT 1: visual exploration test for evaluate SM and ASM; VETT 2: visual exploration test for evaluate the number of SM during simulated driving

Keywords:

• Oculomotor training
• safe driving
• eye-tracking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We thank for the collaboration Autodrome of Modena and Directorate of Specialties of the State Police of Italian Ministry of the Interior; Maurizio Manfredi and Marco Manfredi of SVEP srl for technological support; all study participants for their availability.