The Neuroscience of (Dis)Trust: Proactive Takeovers in Human–AV Interaction

This study examines the impact of proactive takeovers on driver trust and associated neural and gaze behaviors across varying automated vehicle (AV) performances. Fifty-seven participants (27 females, 30 males) were grouped by their takeover behaviors across four events that simulated AV capabilities of crash avoidance and silent failures. Participants reported subjective trust scores after experiencing the events. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy-based neural responses included peak frontal, motor, and visual brain activation. Eye tracking-based gaze measures included fixations and gaze entropy metrics. Results indicated that takeover behaviors were associated with lower trust ratings regardless of AV performance. Drivers who proactively took over exhibited suppressed brain activation across the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), intermediate frontal cortex, supplementary motor area, and secondary/tertiary visual cortex, and this was accompanied by greater fixations on the AV disengagement control. On the other hand, drivers who did not take over rated higher trust and exhibited increased DLPFC activity along with greater fixations on the rear-view mirror. The neural and gaze measures, when combined with distrusting takeover behaviors, implicate (1) risk avoidance and bottom-up information processing (e.g., anticipatory gaze behavior) strategies adopted by drivers who demonstrated proactive takeover behaviors and (2) reliance on top-down cognitive processes and prior experiences to assess AV performances by drivers who did not take over regardless of AV performance. Along with underscoring the utility of these granular metrics for informing adaptive human-AV interactions, our study emphasizes the importance of integrating proactive takeover paradigms to examine perception-cognition-action processes of (dis)trusting behaviors during automated driving.