Time domain EEG analysis for evaluating the effects of driver's mental work load during simulated driving

Driver's mental work load has been known for one of the significant causes of traffic accidents in driving situations. Hence, in this study, we investigate the effects of mental work load on brain activity during an emergency situation in driving simulator. We compare the differences of electroencephalography (EEG) signals between emergency situations without- and with mental work load on simulated driving. Visual stimuli for emergency situation and auditory stimuli for mental work load situation were presented independently and simultaneously. We used regularized linear discriminant analysis (RLDA) for classifying event-related potentials (ERPs) on mental events which are related to brain activity in time domain. The classification results in the emergency situations with the mental work load were significantly reduced as compared with in the only emergency situations.