The aim of the present study is to analyze how well physiological
measures of sleepiness derived from pupillography and the Multiple
Sleep Latency Test correlate with a subjective measure, the
Stanford Sleepiness Scale (SSS) score. The results are based
on data from 12 healthy participants, who underwent these tests
every 2 hr from 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. Sleep latencies were
correlated with four different variables derived from pupillography
and the SSS score. The results indicate that the physiologically
based variables correspond very well. This is reflected by similar
patterns of time-of-day variations, a good agreement at the
group level, and correlations at the individual level, whereas
the SSS shows a quite different pattern of variation. The two
physiological measures of sleepiness seem to reflect the same
aspect of the level of tonic central nervous activation, which
is not correlated with the subjective feeling of sleepiness.