Sympathetic Loading in Critical Tasks

In this dissertation I developed or perfected unobtrusive methods to quantify sympathetic arousals. Furthermore, I used these methods to study the sympathetic system's role on critical activities, arriving at intriguing conclusions. Sympathetic arousals occur during states of mental, emotional, and/or sensorimotor strain resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances. They are key elements of human physiology's coping mechanism, shoring up resources to a good effect. When the intensity and duration of these arousals are overwhelming, however, then they may block memory and disrupt rational thought or actions at the moment they are needed the most. Arousals abound in three types of critical activities: high-stakes situations, challenging tasks, and critical multitasking. Accordingly, my research was based on three studies representative of these three activity types: `Subject Screening', `Educational Exam', and `Distracted Driving'. In the first study I investigated the association of sympathetic arousals with deceptive behavior in interrogations. In the second study, I investigated the relationship between sympathetic arousals and exam performance. In the third study, I investigated the interaction between sympathetic arousals and driving performance under cognitive, emotional, and sensorimotor distractions. In the interrogation study, I used for the first time a contact-free electrodermal activity measurement method to quantify arousals. The method detected deceptive behavior based on differential sympathetic responses in well-structured interviews. In the exam study, I documented that sympathetic arousals positively correlate with students' exam performance, dispelling the myth of `easy going' super achievers. Finally, in the driving study, my results revealed that not only apparent sensorimotor stressors (texting while driving) but also hidden stressors (cognitive or emotional) could have a significant effect on driving performance.Computer Science, Department o

A multimodal dataset for various forms of distracted driving

We describe a multimodal dataset acquired in a controlled experiment on a driving simulator. The set includes data for n = 68 volunteers that drove the same highway under four different conditions: No distraction, cognitive distraction, emotional distraction, and sensorimotor distraction. The experiment closed with a special driving session, where all subjects experienced a startle stimulus in the form of unintended acceleration-half of them under a mixed distraction, and the other half in the absence of a distraction. During the experimental drives key response variables and several explanatory variables were continuously recorded. The response variables included speed, acceleration, brake force, steering, and lane position signals, while the explanatory variables included perinasal electrodermal activity (EDA), palm EDA, heart rate, breathing rate, and facial expression signals; biographical and psychometric covariates as well as eye tracking data were also obtained. This dataset enables research into driving behaviors under neatly abstracted distracting stressors, which account for many car crashes. The set can also be used in physiological channel benchmarking and multispectral face recognition