Off-days have real-world consequences: The utility of high-frequency cognitive assessment to predict naturalistic driving behaviors

It is becoming common to repeatedly measure cognition over short intervals in order to capture dynamic fluctuations over time, which can be substantial. It is currently unknown whether daily deviations in cognitive performance have implications for real-world behaviors or merely reflect short-term change of limited scope, perhaps due to assessment artifacts. Daily driving behavior was captured in a group of adults using GPS tracking and participants also completed daily repeated assessments of high frequency cognitive testing. Multilevel negative binomial models were constructed to relate daily cognitive performance to adverse driving events (e.g., speeding or hard braking). Results indicate that on days when cognition is poor relative to the participants’ average functioning, incidence of adverse events increased. Global cognitive ability did not predict driving behavior. These results show that deviations in cognitive performance are not merely “noise”, as they have measurable implications on real-world outcomes that may have implications for driver safety.