Driving Anxiety and Attentional Processes while Driving on Simulator

Driving anxiety is a common phenomenon that may have repercussions on traffic safety. To assess them, a study combining subjective, behavioural and neurophysiological data has been conducted. While performing a car simulator driving task, participants with different level of driving anxiety, were also required to detect rare deviant sounds within a stream of standard sounds. The results confirm that the more anxious people are about driving, the more cautious they are. However, neurophysiological data suggest a reduction in attentional resources allocated to the processing standard sounds.