Dissecting Driver Behaviors Under Cognitive, Emotional, Sensorimotor, and Mixed Stressors

Abstract

In a simulation experiment we studied the effects of cognitive, emotional, sensorimotor, and mixed stressors on driver arousal and performance with respect to (wrt) baseline. In a sample of n = 59 drivers, balanced in terms of age and gender, we found that all stressors incurred significant increases in mean sympathetic arousal accompanied by significant increases in mean absolute steering. The latter, translated to significantly larger range of lane departures only in the case of sensorimotor and mixed stressors, indicating more dangerous driving wrt baseline. In the case of cognitive or emotional stressors, often a smaller range of lane departures was observed, indicating safer driving wrt baseline. This paradox suggests an effective coping mechanism at work, which compensates erroneous reactions precipitated by cognitive or emotional conflict. This mechanisms’ grip slips, however, when the feedback loop is intermittently severed by sensorimotor distractions. Interestingly, mixed stressors did not affect crash rates in startling events, suggesting that the coping mechanism’s compensation time scale is above the range of neurophysiological latency.

Causality Effects of Interventions and Stressors on Driving Behaviors under Typical Conditions

“…In this paper, we used a publicly available dataset which was obtained as a result of controlled experiments on distracted driving using the driving simulator shown in Figure 2 [26,33,34]. For these controlled experiments, the subjects were recruited from a local community (population about 250,000) through email solicitations and flier postings.…”

“…Two different controlled experiments were run using the driving simulator to obtain this multimodal dataset, as explained in references [26,33,34]. Experiment 1 was based on a crossover design repeated measures design, such that each experimental unit (subject) received different treatments (stressor) during the different time periods.…”

“…The main differences between Experiments 1 and 2 are (i) facial expressions could be included, and (ii) we only had loaded versus non-loaded drives instead of normal drive, cognitive drive, emotional drive, and sensorimotor drive in the second experiment. At the end, the drives included a collusion path that would usually result in a traffic accident [26].…”

“…In this work, we provide a scientific study with advanced statistical and machine learning methods to explain the relation between distracted driving and traffic accidents and to provide some illumination to this causality problem. Our statistical analysis is based on one of the most detailed studies on distracted driving that was obtained by virtual simulations [26]. This study provides a significantly large multimodal dataset that includes a no distraction (ND) drive and three type of distracted drives: driving under cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor interventions (or stressors).…”

Effects of Tunnel Environment on Speed Cognitive Skills in Drivers

“…Li studied driving behavior caused by visual and cognitive factors, analyzed the multi model features used to distinguish visual dispersion factors and cognitive dispersion factors, and proposed a method of driving behavior definition based on visual cognition dispersion space (Li and Busso, 2015). Pavlidis through the simulation experiment of the 59 pilots, studied the effect of cognitive level, emotional factors, sensorimotor ability and stress of different factors on the driver's arousal level, compared with the standard of performance, and obtained a solution of cognitive errors or emotional factors, coping mechanism of compensation (Pavlidis et al, 2016). Pasquale Sena developed an experimental framework for braking response time for different levels of excitation based on the DRIVE IN2 project, and studied the cognitive decentralization that led to it (Pasquale et al, 2016).…”