The Effect of Map Information on Brain Activation During a Driving Task.

Until now, GPRS/GPS/GIS based on vehicle navigation and monitoring systems have been popularly developed to satisfy the demand for the intelligent transportation system (ITS). Such systems provide the large traffic convenience to drivers, but at the same time attach more burdens to drivers for learning about map information. Hence it is worth further verifying the negative effect of vehicle navigation and monitoring systems on drivers. Considering that human driving behavior is strongly relevant to cognitive characteristics, this study will address to the effect of vehicle navigation systems on drivers by means of measuring and analyzing the 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 the different cases of a driving simulator. Experimental results indicated that, compared with the case of no map information available, there is no more obvious priority of activation for left brain and right brain in the case of map information available. Meanwhile, there seems to be a complete activation for the prefrontal cortex of left and right brain, suggesting that GPRS/GPS/GIS based vehicle navigation systems may exhaust drivers more easily so as to bring about more danger than traffic convenience under driving environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]