Revisiting Interactions of Multiple Driver States in Heterogenous Population and Cognitive Tasks

Abstract: In real-world driving scenarios, multiple states occur simultaneously due to individual differences and environmental factors, complicating the analysis and estimation of driver states. Previous studies, limited by experimental design and analytical methods, may not be able to disentangle the relationships among multiple driver states and environmental factors. This paper introduces the Double Machine Learning (DML) analysis method to the field of driver state analysis to tackle this challenge. To train and test the DML model, a driving simulator experiment with 42 participants was conducted. All participants drove SAE level-3 vehicles and conducted three types of cognitive tasks in a 3-hour driving experiment. Drivers' subjective cognitive load and drowsiness levels were collected throughout the experiment. Then, we isolated individual and environmental factors affecting driver state variations and the factors affecting drivers' physiological and eye-tracking metrics when they are under specific states. The results show that our approach successfully decoupled and inferred the complex causal relationships between multiple types of drowsiness and cognitive load. Additionally, we identified key physiological and eye-tracking indicators in the presence of multiple driver states and under the influence of a single state, excluding the influence of other driver states, environmental factors, and individual characteristics. Our causal inference analytical framework can offer new insights for subsequent analysis of drivers' states. Further, the updated causal relation graph based on the DML analysis can provide theoretical bases for driver state monitoring based on physiological and eye-tracking measures.