Abstract
Driving decision-making is a process where drivers make the right driving choices and behaviour by responding to different traffic situations. It derives from Ergonomics and its inevitable tools are computers. Accordingly, driving-related problems will be solved through the interactive way between human and machine. With the development of Cognitive Psychology, the relevant researches have been connected with psychology and became the centre of traffic psychology in recent years. In the course of studies, the researchers began to emphasize the role that drivers' psychological factors played in driving decision-making, and to explore the mechanism on how it works. The most important thing is to figure out what psychology can do in improving the driving decision-making ability.
The studies of driving decision-making has went through three periods: behaviour modeling, psychological measurements and empirical research. Driving decision-making was put forward for the first time in the period of behaviour modeling, when the researchers added motivational factors in driving behaviours based on Ergonomics. Then, in the period of psychological measurements, the studies focused on analysing the factors that affected driving decision-making by constructing scales. Due to the improvements of the experimental methods, the researchers began to use behavioral experiments, eye movements or EEG to analyse the structure of driving decision-making in the period of empirical research. It was in this period that the researchers got some fruitful results. They came to a conclusion that its structure was in line with the dual decision-making model, and it was, at the same time, affected by both cognitive and emotional factors.
The previous studies have revealed that driving decision-making was influenced by age, gender, risk perception, emotion as well as decision-making style. Generally speaking, in driving, young drivers will take more risk than adults, female drivers' decision-making are more prone to be affected by emotion. In the Iowa Gambling Task, female drivers' neural activities are more active. Driver, whose risk perception ability is higher, is easier to make correct driving decisions and they tend to have less risky behaviors. When the emotional state reaches to a critical level, it will affect the decision-making, too. Decision-making style is the habitual way of behavior; it has a stable impact on the process of making decisions in different traffic situations.
The purpose of traffic psychology is to prevent accidents and decrease the lost of casualty, thus making the improvements of driving decision-making became a newly-emerged field in China. Improving drivers' risk perception ability, as has been proved in some studies overseas, is a possible and tentative way. In the future, researchers should further the studies by focusing on the following three aspects: (a) analyze its structure and process from a cognitive or emotional perspective; (b) improve driving decision-making ability through training; (c) explore its features under the context of China's unique traffic culture so as to make it serve our drivers as early as possible.
Key words
driver, driving decision-making , the improvement of decision-making, research paradigm
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The Development and Prospect of Researches on Driving Decision-making[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2014, 37(4): 862-866
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