Modeling Situation Awareness and Crash Risk

摘要

In this article we develop a model of the relationship between crash risk and a driver’s situation awareness. We consider a driver’s situation awareness to reflect the dynamic mental model of the driving environment and to be dependent upon several psychological processes including >Scanning the driving environment, >Predicting and anticipating hazards, >Identifying potential hazards in the driving scene as they occur, >Deciding on an action, and >Executing an appropriate >Response (SPIDER). Together, SPIDER is important for establishing and maintaining good situation awareness of the driving environment and good situation awareness is important for coordinating and scheduling the SPIDER-relevant processes necessary for safe driving. An Order-of-Processing (OP) model makes explicit the SPIDER-relevant processes and how they predict the likelihood of a crash when the driver is or is not distracted by a secondary task. For example, the OP model shows how a small decrease in the likelihood of any particular SPIDER activity being completed successfully (because of a concurrent secondary task performance) would lead to a large increase in the relative risk of a crash.