Acute alcohol impairment is an important research topic for traffic safety as alcohol is a factor in a significant portion of traffic crashes. This chapter discusses how to identify the types of impairment due to different levels of blood alcohol concentration using a driving simulator. Driving simulators have been used for almost 40 years to test the effect of alcohol on driving performance. Driving simulation provides the scenario control and ethical management of risk to support experimentation of impairment effects across levels of alcohol. Research using driving simulation has identified impairment of steering and braking performance, problems with maintaining vehicle position and speed, and impairment of reaction time to hazards. In general, driving simulators were able to identify many of the impairment effects seen in closed-course testing using a real vehicle. A standard set of driving scenarios does not exist for alcohol-impaired driving as the goal of previous research has been to identify all areas of driving skill that are impaired by alcohol. In general, scenarios can include common driving situations used in most types of driving simulation research, such as car following, responding to emergency events, and general driving on a variety of road types. Measures that are observable in both test track and simulator studies may hold the most validity for alcohol research and these include speed variability, lateral position deviations, and responses to hazards in the driving environment. However, not all measures have been tested in both settings; therefore, it is important to select measures that reflect the research question or for which impaired performance may lead to a safety critical situation. Research shows that driving performance impairment occurs in simulated driving and similar measures can be observed from lower- and higher-complexity simulator systems. However, certain measures may not be sensitive to alcohol effects in lower-complexity simulators due to the lower task demand imposed by a low-complexity system that does not require attention management between multiple sensory components analogous to the real world.
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