title: Risk-taking on the road and in the mind: behavioural and neural patterns of decision making between risky and safe drivers.
abstract: Drivers' risk-taking is a key issue of road safety. This study explored individual differences in drivers' decision-making, linking external behaviours to internal neural activity, to reveal the cognitive mechanisms of risky driving. Twenty-four male drivers were split into two groups (risky vs. safe drivers) via the Drivier Behaviour Questionnaire-violation. The risky drivers demonstrated higher preference for the risky choices in the paradigms of Iowa Gambling Task and Balloon Analogue Risk Task. More importantly, the risky drivers showed lower amplitudes of feedback-related negativity (FRN) and loss-minus-gain FRN in both paradigms, which indicated their neural processing of error-detection. A significant difference of P300 amplitudes was also reported between groups, which indicated their neural processing of reward-evaluation and were modified by specific paradigm and feedback. These results suggested that the neural basis of risky driving was the decision patterns less revised by losses and more motivated by rewards.
  Risk-taking on the road is largely determined by inherent cognitive mechanisms, which can be indicated by the behavioural and neural patterns of decision-making. In this regard, it is feasible to quantize drivers’ riskiness in the cognitive stage before actual risky driving or accidents, and intervene accordingly.
authors.affiliation: a State Key Laboratory of Automobile Safety and Energy, Department of Industrial Engineering , Tsinghua University , Beijing , P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yutao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ba
authors.affiliation: a State Key Laboratory of Automobile Safety and Energy, Department of Industrial Engineering , Tsinghua University , Beijing , P. R. China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: a State Key Laboratory of Automobile Safety and Energy, Department of Industrial Engineering , Tsinghua University , Beijing , P. R. China.
authors.forename: QiJia
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: a State Key Laboratory of Automobile Safety and Energy, Department of Industrial Engineering , Tsinghua University , Beijing , P. R. China.
authors.forename: Gavriel
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Salvendy
authors.affiliation: b Division of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University , Nottingham , UK.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Crundall
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001334:Automobile Driving / Q000523:psychology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology; D030141:Feedback, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology; D012201:Reward; D012309:Risk-Taking; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: decision making; driving; event related potentials; individual differences; transportation safety