Playing Games Guiding Attention Improves Situation Awareness and Takeover Quality during Automated Driving

Abstract

During SAE L3 automated driving, drivers engage in non-driving related tasks (NTRDs), but NTRDs impair situation awareness (SA) and takeover quality. This study aimed to find an NTRD that is interesting but has a minimal negative impact on SA. Given the strong impact of games on cognition, we studied how games affected SA and takeover performance. In the game survey, we investigated the impact of four type of games on driving SA. The results showed that there were some games positively affected SA (situational game). In the formal experiment, we used a realistic simulated driving environment to investigate the effect of games on SA and takeover performance. A 3 (task type: situational game/non-situational game/monitoring) × 4 (attention duration, time between monitoring requests and takeover requests: 4 s/6 s/8 s/10 s) mixed design was used. Results showed that drivers who engaged in the situational game had higher SA, better takeover performance, and required less attention duration than drivers who engaged in the non-situational game. Both groups showed faster takeover time than the monitoring group, indicating higher arousal. Our research results indicate that playing situational games can improve SA and takeover quality in automated driving.

Keywords:

• Non-driving-related tasks
• situation awareness
• video game
• L3 automated driving

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant #31571131] and 20-163-12-ZT-001-006-04 to R.T.

Notes on contributors

Tingwei Jiang

Tingwei Jiang is a PhD student in the School of Social and Behavioral Science at Nanjing University. His research interests include cognition of action, human-computer interaction, and situation awareness.

Ying Wang

Ying Wang has a master’s degree in applied psychology from Nanjing University. Her research focuses on automated driving and situation awareness.

Rixin Tang

Rixin Tang is a professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Science at Nanjing University. He received his PhD in engineering psychology from Zhejiang University. His research field include cognition of action and human-computer interaction.