Playing Games Guiding Attention Improves Situation Awareness and Takeover Quality during Automated Driving

During SAE L3 automated driving, drivers engage in non-driving related tasks (NTRDs), but NTRDs impair situation awareness (SA) and takeover quality. This study aimed to find an NTRD that is interesting but has a minimal negative impact on SA. Given the strong impact of games on cognition, we studied how games affected SA and takeover performance. In the game survey, we investigated the impact of four type of games on driving SA. The results showed that there were some games positively affected SA (situational game). In the formal experiment, we used a realistic simulated driving environment to investigate the effect of games on SA and takeover performance. A 3 (task type: situational game/non-situational game/monitoring) × 4 (attention duration, time between monitoring requests and takeover requests: 4 s/6 s/8 s/10 s) mixed design was used. Results showed that drivers who engaged in the situational game had higher SA, better takeover performance, and required less attention duration than drivers who engaged in the non-situational game. Both groups showed faster takeover time than the monitoring group, indicating higher arousal. Our research results indicate that playing situational games can improve SA and takeover quality in automated driving.