Electrophysiological assessment of driving pleasure and difficulty using a task-irrelevant probe technique
Introduction
The concept of attentional resources is important in understanding our daily cognitive activities. It is assumed that attentional resources available at a given time are limited and must be deployed to concurrent cognitive processes (e.g., Kahneman, 1973). One of the critical factors affecting the deployment of attentional resources is task difficulty: Performing difficult tasks requires more resources than performing easy tasks. Since depletion of attentional resources is closely related to the occurrence of human errors, assessment of task difficulty, or the amount of attentional resources that are required to perform a certain task in real (or nearly-real) environments, is important to create safe working conditions. Electrophysiological studies have suggested that event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by task-irrelevant auditory probes can be a useful measure of the difficulty of a visual task (Allison & Polich, 2008; Kramer, Trejo, & Humphrey, 1995; Miller, Rietschel, McDonald, & Hatfield, 2011; Ullsperger, Freude, & Erdmann, 2001). For example, Kramer et al. (1995) presented a task-irrelevant auditory oddball sequence while participants performed a radar-monitoring task. They demonstrated that the amplitudes of ERPs elicited by rare, deviant stimuli of auditory probes decreased as the difficulty of the radar-monitoring task increased. The task-irrelevant auditory probe technique assumes that residual attentional resources that can be consumed by the processing of auditory probes are reduced when participants allocate more attentional resources to the visual task, which results in a decrease of the amplitudes of ERPs.
Attentional resources are related not only to task difficulty but also to the affective state of the participant. Recent studies have reported that the task-irrelevant probe technique can be a useful measure of interest in visual environments (Takeda and Kimura, 2014, Takeda et al., 2014). Takeda et al. (2014) asked participants to walk through a simulated shopping mall (i.e., go window-shopping) using a virtual-reality system and measured the amplitudes of ERPs elicited by task-irrelevant auditory probes. The results showed that the ERP amplitudes were lower when participants walked in an interesting environment than when they walked in a boring environment. Similarly, Takeda and Kimura (2014) showed that the amplitudes of ERPs elicited by auditory probes were lower for participants watching interesting video clips than for those watching boring ones. It has been suggested that interest is a basic positive emotion, which facilitates selective attention to particular objects, events, and goals (Izard, 2009). Thus, it is reasonable to assume that attentional resources are consumed when participants are interested in a certain condition, and residual resources available to allocate to auditory probes are reduced.
In our daily life, task difficulty and interest can be derived independently; that is, we can feel interest when the task is not difficult, such as going window-shopping (Takeda et al., 2014) or watching a movie (Takeda & Kimura, 2014), and task difficulty does not always accompany our feeling of interest. Nevertheless, these mental states are similar from the viewpoint of attentional resource consumption and may be closely related to each other in certain situations; for example, video-game players should not feel interest if the difficulty of the game is low. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no systematic evidence concerning the consumption of attentional resources when task difficulty and feeling of interest vary in a correlated manner. From an application viewpoint, especially in automotive research, developing techniques to assess task difficulty and the feeling of interest is a pressing concern, because recent developments in autonomous vehicle technology will reduce driving difficulty but may also reduce interest in driving (i.e., driving pleasure).
The present study investigated how the amplitudes of ERPs elicited by task-irrelevant probes are influenced by variations in driving pleasure and driving difficulty. Furthermore, we examined whether or not the degree of pleasure can be assessed separately from the degree of difficulty by means of the task-irrelevant probe technique. Some researchers have proposed that we have multiple attentional resources that can be used at specific processing stages (e.g., Isreal, Chesney, Wickens, & Donchin, 1980). If the mental states of driving pleasure and difficulty consume attentional resources at different processing stages, these mental states may be separately assessable. We used the task-irrelevant auditory probe technique to assess the consumption of participants’ attentional resources while they drove a vehicle in a driving simulator system. Four road course conditions were created by manipulating the frequency and mean radius of curves. After driving in each condition, participants were asked to rate subjective driving pleasure and difficulty. Based on previous findings, it was expected that the amplitude of ERPs elicited by task-irrelevant auditory probes should decrease when participants experienced driving pleasure and/or difficulty. In addition, if driving pleasure and driving difficulty consume attentional resources at different processing stages, it is possible that their effects will appear in different ERP components.
Section snippets
Participants
Seventeen young adults (4 females; age range = 19–36 years old; mean age = 23.9 years old) participated. All participants had driver’s licenses and more than one year of driving experience, and all reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision and normal hearing. They were paid to participate in the experiment. The study was approved by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Safety and Ethics committee and was conducted only after each of the participants had
Subjective ratings
The mean subjective scores of driving pleasure and difficulty are shown in Fig. 2(A and B, respectively). For the pleasure scores, the frequency (2) × radius (2) × steering (2) ANOVA revealed significant main effects of frequency, F(1, 16) = 4.98, p < 0.05, ηp2 = 0.24, and radius, F(1, 16) = 23.28, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.59. These main effects were superseded by a significant frequency × radius interaction, F(1, 16) = 6.40, p < 0.05, ηp2 = 0.29. A post-hoc analysis showed a significant difference between the infrequent
Discussion
The present study examined the amplitudes of the N1 and P2 components elicited by task-irrelevant probes of a variable tone frequency sequence when participants experienced driving pleasure and/or difficulty. The results for subjective driving pleasure showed that participants reported the greatest driving pleasure when they drove on the road course that had more frequent and sharper curves (i.e., the frequent-sharp condition). On the other hand, the results for subjective driving difficulty
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