Measurement and Analysis of Brain Activation during a Driving Task

As we know, human driving behavior is strongly relevant to cognitive characteristics. If such characteristics could be clarified, it will contribute to exploration of those issues for cognitive process and even the development of modern traffic tools. This study will address to the driving characteristics by means of measurement and analysis of cognitive state inside brain. In this paper, a relatively new method of multi-channel near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to investigate the brain activation by independently manipulating the cognitive demand in a driving simulator. One conclusion was drawn: in spite of changing traffic scene, there seems to be relatively stable effect in a number of collaborating areas of brain which each have multiple relative specializations and engage in extensive inter-area collaborations. Concretely, left brain plays an initiative pole, while right brain closely follows towards the activation degree of left brain. Consequently, there is a balanced tendency of symmetrical activation for left and right brain, suggesting that an easier model may be feasible for modeling driving cognitive process that operates on different levels of environment.