Development of fatigue symptoms during simulated driving

Why do people sometimes allow themselves to be overcome by fatigue? Ancient human survival may have depended on ignoring fatigue. Its modern occurrence in the absence of strain may further render us insensitive to its warning value. To test whether deliberate monitoring of certain symptoms may help drivers and other workers realize when they need to rest to avoid hazard, the development of fatigue while driving a simulator was objectively measured in terms of how many persons quit driving as a function of time. Some subjects asked to stop after 90 minutes; others lasted 240 minutes. Grouping data from an adapted Pearson [(1957) Journal of Applied Psychology, 44, 186-191] fatigue checklist revealed a curious phenomenon. No matter how long subjects drove before wanting to quit, they still developed much the same subjective level of fatigue at the end. This suggests that people do not differ greatly in how much fatigue they can tolerate but rather how quickly they reach a certain critical level of fatigue. Averaging fatigue scores backwards from the time subjects quit produced a function similar to the quitting function. Similar treatment of the other data revealed certain clusters of symptoms whose development also paralleled the development of fatigue. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.