The research found that people’s attention levels and how engrossed they are in on-screen activities can be detected from their eye movements.

Although fully autonomous driverless cars are not yet available for personal use, cars with a ‘driverless’ autopilot mode are available for commercial private use in some locations, including Germany and certain US states.

Tesla, for example, has an ‘Autopilot’ mode, which can steer, accelerate and brake within lanes, while ‘Full Self-Driving’ lets vehicles obey traffic signals and change lanes. But both technologies “require active driver supervision”, with a “fully attentive” driver whose hands are on the wheel, “and do not make the vehicle autonomous”.

Drivers can, for example, use the limited driverless functionality during a traffic jam on a motorway – but once the jam has cleared and the motorway allows faster than 40mph speeds, the AI will send a ‘takeover’ signal to the driver, indicating that they must...