P300 Event-Related Potential in Perception of Multiple Traffic Objects During Vehicle Driving

Visual attention is a function of the brain that allocates its computational resources to enable us to attend to the most important visual information. In actual driving, there are many perceptual objects such as pedestrians, signals, and other vehicles, etc. To selectively recognize these traffic objects for safe driving, the driver’s gaze is appropriately controlled under visual attention. It is known that the P300 event-related potential related to visual attention, and is an essential brain activity to understanding the visual-attention characteristics in visual search. Although the P300 response reflects visual attention, the response characteristics of the P300 especially regarding the multiple object search are largely unexplored. To understand the brain activity on visual attention for multiple objects, we measure the P300 response and examined especially its characteristics for the types of traffic objects in terms of the capacity of induction for visual attention.