Investigating risk-taking and executive functioning as predictors of driving performances and habits: a large-scale population study with on-road evaluation.

Introduction: Maladaptive behavior often results from poor decision-making and by extension poor control over decisions. Since maladaptive behavior in driving, such as excessive speed, can lead to dramatic consequences, identifying its causes is of particular concern. The present study investigated how risk-taking and executive functioning are related to driving performance and habits among the general population. Method: Five hundred and eighty-nine participants completed an on-road driving session with a professional driving instructor and a self-reported checklist of difficult driving situations typically avoided. Additionally, participants completed a set of experimental tasks assessing risk-taking tendencies, reactive adaptive mechanisms, and two distinct forms of inhibition: interference control and response inhibition. Results: The results of the present study revealed several significant findings. Firstly, poor driving performance was associated with a high avoidance of challenging driving situations. Secondly, neither form of inhibition studied (interference control or response inhibition) predicted driving performance. Thirdly, while greater involvement in reactive adaptive mechanisms did not predict better on-road performance, it was associated with a reduced tendency to avoid difficult situations. Surprisingly, a higher propensity for risk-taking predicted better on-road performance. Discussion: Overall, these results underline limited links between executive functioning and driving performance while highlighting a potentially more complex relationship between risk-taking tendencies and driving. Executive functioning, however, appears to be linked to driving habits.

Imbalanced weighting of proactive and reactive control as a marker of risk-taking propensity.

According to the dual mechanisms of control (DMC), reactive and proactive control are involved in adjusting behaviors when maladapted to the environment. However, both contextual and inter-individual factors increase the weight of one control mechanism over the other, by influencing their cognitive costs. According to one of the DMC postulates, limited reactive control capacities should be counterbalanced by greater proactive control to ensure control efficiency. Moreover, as the flexible weighting between reactive and proactive control is key for adaptive behaviors, we expected that maladaptive behaviors, such as risk-taking, would be characterized by an absence of such counterbalance. However, to our knowledge, no studies have yet investigated this postulate. In the current study, we analyzed the performances of 176 participants on two reaction time tasks (Simon and Stop Signal tasks) and a risk-taking assessment (Balloon Analog Risk Taking, BART). The post-error slowing in the Simon task was used to reflect the spontaneous individuals' tendency to proactively adjust behaviors after an error. The Stop Signal Reaction Time was used to assess reactive inhibition capacities and the duration of the button press in the BART was used as an index of risk-taking propensity. Results showed that poorer reactive inhibition capacities predicted greater proactive adjustments after an error. Furthermore, the higher the risk-taking propensity, the less reactive inhibition capacities predicted proactive behavioral adjustments. The reported results suggest that higher risk-taking is associated with a smaller weighting of proactive control in response to limited reactive inhibition capacities. These findings highlight the importance of considering the imbalanced weighting of reactive and proactive control in the analysis of risk-taking, and in a broader sense, maladaptive behaviors.

Interaction between eye and body movements to perform visual tasks in upright stance.

Synergistic interactions between visual and postural behaviors were observed in a previous study during a precise visual task (search for a specific target in a picture) performed upright as steady as possible. The goal of the present study was to confirm and extend these novel findings in a more ecological condition with no steadiness requirement. Twelve healthy young adults performed two visual tasks, i.e. a precise task and a control task (free-viewing). Center of pressure, lower back, neck, head and eye movements were recorded during each task. The subjective cognitive workload was assessed after each task (NASA-TLX questionnaire). Pearson correlations and cross-correlations between eyes (time-series, characteristics of fixation) and center of pressure/body movements were used to test the synergistic model. As expected, significant negative Pearson correlations between eye and head-neck movement variables were only observed in searching. They indicated that larger precise gaze shifts were correlated with lower head and neck movements. One cross-correlation coefficient (between COP on the AP axis and eyes in the up/down direction) was also significantly higher, i.e. stronger, in searching than in free-viewing. These synergistic interactions likely required greater cognitive demand as indicated by the greater NASA-TLX score in searching. Moreover, the previous Pearson correlations were no longer significant after controlling for the NASA-TLX global score (thanks to partial correlations). This study provides new evidence of the existence of a synergistic process between visual and postural behaviors during visual search tasks.

Relations between Eye Movement, Postural Sway and Cognitive Involvement in Unprecise and Precise Visual Tasks.

We studied eye and body movements in 16 healthy young adults who performed visual tasks in upright stance. Our objective was to investigate whether these movements could be functionally related to each other when performing a precise visual task requiring large ecological gaze shifts. We also questioned the influence of an additional counting task on these relations. The participants performed searching (precise), free-viewing (unprecise) and gaze-fixation (basic) either alone or in counting silently backwards in sevens. For the search task, the participants had to visually locate as many targets as possible in the images. For the free-viewing task, they had to watch images randomly. Based on a recent model, we expected to find negative correlations between eye and center of pressure and/or body (lower back, neck, head) movements only in the search tasks. The double search-counting task was expected to increase the number of negative correlations. The results confirmed both hypotheses in both search tasks, with relations mainly between eye and head movements (89% of the time). The subjective cognitive involvement (significantly higher in searching than in free-viewing and gaze-fixation) was significantly related to all (100%) and to half (50%) of these previous correlations in search-counting and searching, respectively. Complementarily, the participants rotated their segments and oscillated more in searching than free-viewing and more in both tasks than in gaze-fixation. This study confirmed that precise visual tasks may require the brain to control synergistic relations between eye and body movements instead of individual eye and body movements.