Investigating mind-wandering while driving with a continuous virtual-reality driving task

Drivers frequently find themselves focusing on things other than the road—in fact, research has shown that around 50% of the time, people are daydreaming or “mind wandering” behind the wheel. This is not without consequence: mind wandering is at the top of the list of causes of fatal traffic accidents. This project aims to better understand when, why, and how the mind wanders during driving, and how it can be detected and potentially prevented.

To study whether mind wandering can be detected or even predicted from people’s eye movements and pupillary changes, a virtual reality driving simulator will be designed. Because it is also important to understand when mind wandering becomes dangerous, the project will also shed light on how different types and degrees of mind wandering affect driving behaviors. Working closely with Veilig Verkeer Nederland ensures that the project findings will be translated into campaigns to promote safe and attentive driving.

Project objectives

This project has three main objectives:

1. create an ecologically valid VR environment to conduct research in;
2. optimize the VR environment for measuring mind wandering;
3. assess the relationships between different degrees of mind wandering and measures of gaze and pupil size and dilations.  

Potential impact

Given the direct link between mind wandering and traffic accidents, it is important to inform drivers about the risks of driving while preoccupied, and help them recognize or avoid situations in which mind wanderings likely to interfere with driving. To maximize the societal impact of this project, the largest national traffic safety organization, Veilig Verkeer Nederland (VVN), will closely collaborate on the project. The project findings are highly relevant for recent VVN campaigns that are focused on increasing attention in traffic (e.g., the MONO-campaign, focused on reducing distraction from mobile devices in traffic).

Duration

The project will run for one year starting from July 2023 onwards.

Multidisciplinary project team

Lead applicant Dr. Andrew Reid, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology,  has developed a driving task over the past few years in order to investigate the activation of the brain’s arousal system under naturalistic conditions, and has the necessary expertise to implement this in a VR environment and to measure and interpret pupil dilation. He will work together with Phillip Brown, researcher at the Department of Cognitive Sciences and Artificial Intelligence, who manages the VR system at MindLabs and has expertise in setting up navigation tasks and preventing motion sickness in VR.

Dr. Myrthe Faber, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, is an expert in the field of MW research. She has previously developed a machine learning tool to predict mind wandering from gaze in the context of reading, and is currently leading an NWO Veni project that aims to establish the eye gaze correlates of different degrees of MW in naturalistic tasks.  

Importantly, to translate the project findings into societal impact in the field of traffic safety, the largest national traffic safety organization, Veilig Verkeer Nederland (VVN), is part of the team as a public stakeholder. They will be actively involved in co-designing the study to ensure that the knowledge that is generated is valuable and relevant and that this knowledge can be transferred to the general audience.

This project is funded by Tilburg University’s Digital Sciences for Society program: