[Effect of low alcohol concentrations on visual attention in street traffic]

There is currently public discussion as to whether the legal limit of blood alcohol concentration of drivers might be reduced from 0.8% to 0.5%. To acquire information concerning this problem, we measured temporal parameters of saccades and analysed the overall eye-movement behaviour with various blood ethanol concentrations. Eye movements were registered with an IR eye tracker and analysed while the subjects followed a randomly moving stimulus on a CRT screen and during presentation of a realistic traffic scene of 4 min duration on a TV screen. Alcohol has a significant effect on latency, velocity and accuracy of saccades, even at low concentrations between 0.4% and 0.6%. Because of the altered "gaze activity", the inflow of visual information is reduced in a state of inebriation. Our results are a further argument for reducing the legal limit of blood alcohol concentration to 0.5%.