Fatigue-related impairment in the speed, accuracy and variability of psychomotor performance: Comparison with blood alcohol levels

Abstract

Cognitive performance is impaired by fatigue arising from sustained wakefulness and alcohol. Three recent papers directly compared the effects of increasing fatigue and blood alcohol concentration (%BAC) to provide a framework for understanding fatigue-related cognitive impairment. While the expression of fatigue-related cognitive impairments in terms of %BAC equivalents is sound, the methodology in each study was flawed in that the statistics used to compare the effects of %BAC and fatigue on cognition did not account for variation between or within each condition. The point estimates of the difference between a baseline and any level of fatigue or %BAC provided no indication of the size of..