Abstract
Driving assistance technology has gained traction in recent years and is becoming more widely used in vehicles. However, drivers usually experience a reduced sense of agency when driving assistance is active even though automated assistance improves driving performance by reducing human error and ensuring quick reactions. The present study examined whether driving assistance can maintain human sense of agency during early deceleration in the face of collision risk, compared with manual deceleration. In the experimental task, participants decelerate their vehicle in a driving simulator to avoid collision with a vehicle that suddenly cut in front of them and decelerated. In the assisted condition, the system performed deceleration 100 ms after the cut-in. Participants were instructed to decelerate their vehicle and follow the vehicle that cut-in. This design ensured that the deceleration assistance applied a similar control to the vehicle as the drivers intended to, only faster and smoother. Participants rated their sense of agency and their driving performance. The results showed that drivers maintained their sense of agency and improved driving performance under driving assistance. The findings provided insights into designing driving assistance that can maintain drivers’ sense of agency while improving future driving performance. It is important to establish a mode of joint-control in which the system shares the intention of human drivers and provides improved execution of control.
Highlights
Driving automation technology has been developing rapidly in recent decades
The present study examined the influence of an emergency automatic deceleration on sense of agency and driving performance
The present study suggests that a driving assistance system that shares the same intention as the driver can eliminate the trade-off between sense of agency and driving performance
Summary
Driving automation technology has been developing rapidly in recent decades. full driving automation has not been applied to personal-use vehicles, most vehicles manufactured in recent years have implemented automation and assistance functions (SAE International, 2014, 2018), such as cruise control, which automatically controls the speed of the vehicle; lane keep assist, which keeps the vehicle driving within a lane; and automatic emergency braking, which automatically applies emergency brakes when a high risk of collision is detected. Numerous participants failed to respond to undetected risks in time and crashed in the other two conditions This raises the following question: Should a driving assistance system purposively relinquish some control to humans to ensure human driver engagement? Previous empirical studies in cognitive psychology indicate that sense of agency can be improved by external assistance when people achieve better task performance even when their actual control is weakened (Wen et al, 2015b; Inoue et al, 2017). In the present experimental driving task, drivers’ vehicles were cut off by another vehicle, which suddenly decelerated Such circumstances are linked with a high risk of collision because it is difficult for drivers to maintain safe inter-vehicle distance and speed control. To examine whether the driving assistance system had a different effect on sense of agency and driving performance when task difficulty (i.e., risk of collision) varied, we included two risk scenarios: high risk vs. low risk
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
