Risk-taking on the road and in the mind: behavioural and neural patterns of decision making between risky and safe drivers

Abstract

Drivers' risk-taking is a key issue of road safety. This study explored individual differences in drivers' decision-making, linking external behaviours to internal neural activity, to reveal the cognitive mechanisms of risky driving. Twenty-four male drivers were split into two groups (risky vs. safe drivers) via the Drivier Behaviour Questionnaire-violation. The risky drivers demonstrated higher preference for the risky choices in the paradigms of Iowa Gambling Task and Balloon Analogue Risk Task. More importantly, the risky drivers showed lower amplitudes of feedback-related negativity (FRN) and loss-minus-gain FRN in both paradigms, which indicated their neural processing of error-detection. A significant difference of P300 amplitudes was also reported between groups, which indicated their neural processing of reward-evaluation and were modified by specific paradigm and feedback. These results suggested that the neural basis of risky driving was the decision patterns less revised by losses and more motivated by rewards.

Abstract

Practitioner Summary: Risk-taking on the road is largely determined by inherent cognitive mechanisms, which can be indicated by the behavioural and neural patterns of decision-making. In this regard, it is feasible to quantize drivers' riskiness in the cognitive stage before actual risky driving or accidents, and intervene accordingly.

Keywords:

• transportation safety
• driving
• event related potentials
• decision making
• individual differences

Acknowledgements

This study was supported jointly by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under [grant numbers 71371103 and 31271100], and the Open Funding Project of National Key Laboratory of Human Factors Engineering, under [grant number HF2013-K-04]. The authors also wish to acknowledge Dr. Andy Cheng for the constructive suggestions on the experiment design.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.