The neuro-ocular costs of texting during driving

Abstract

Texting while driving is among the most dangerous forms of distraction, yet the neurophysiological mechanisms linking cognitive load, gaze control, and driving behavior remain poorly understood. Here, EEG, eye tracking, head kinematics, and driving performance were recorded in a naturalistic driving task while participants solved arithmetic problems presented on a dashboard-mounted display under low and high working-memory (WM) load, mimicking real-world interaction with dashboard media. High WM load resulted in slower reaction times, reduced accuracy, prolonged gaze toward the stimulus, increased corrective head rotations, and compensatory reductions in driving speed. Time-frequency analysis revealed robust alpha power suppression ([~]8-13 Hz) over occipito-parietal regions scaling with WM load and closely paralleling gaze behavior. Source reconstruction further identified a transient, stimulus-locked increase in oscillatory power at [~]15 Hz involving the ipsilateral cerebellum and posterior parietal preceding the head rotation onset. These findings illuminate the time course of a neuro-ocular action circuit involving cerebellum and cortex as candidate neurophysiological precursor of upcoming behavioral costs as a result of driver distraction. Bridging cognitive neuroscience and applied traffic research, the present results provide an ecologically valid framework for studying action-attention coupling in real-world behavior.