A Car Driver’s Cognition Model

1. Abstract There is a basic need in transportation planning and traffic engineering for developing and testing traffic models of different granularity. Although our major interest is the replication of traffic within larger areas, both the current research on traffic safety and the desire to improve the quality of microscopic simulations makes it necessary to deal with the car driver’s cognition on a finer scale. This paper presents our model assumptions for such sub-microscopic simulations, which are based on results from cognitive psychology. Although some preliminary work of this type is available, most of these applications are not open to the public, which makes them useless for scientific purposes. The cognition simulations available up to now mostly deal with memory processes and are not easily extendable by further structures such as vehicles with their dynamics or a representation of the simulated environment. These considerations motivated us to develop the above mentioned model from scratch. The design of the model described herein includes sub-models of a human being’s perception, visual attention, internal environment representation and decision making as well as the execution of actions in a simulated vehicle. Results both from cognitive psychology and the research on human-machine interaction are incorporated. This paper reveals our premises for a driver’s cognition model and describes the model itself, followed by a discussion of the model’s restrictions. As the implementation process is not yet closed, only some basic results are presented and a look into the future of the model is given.