Understanding driver cognition and decision-making behaviors in high-risk scenarios: A drift diffusion perspective

Ensuring safe interactions between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and human drivers in mixed traffic systems remains a major challenge, particularly in complex, high-risk scenarios. This paper presents a cognition-decision framework that integrates individual variability and commonalities in driver behavior to quantify risk cognition and model dynamic decision-making. First, a risk sensitivity model based on a multivariate Gaussian distribution is developed to characterize individual differences in risk cognition. Then, a cognitive decision-making model based on the drift diffusion model (DDM) is introduced to capture common decision-making mechanisms in high-risk environments. The DDM dynamically adjusts decision thresholds by integrating initial bias, drift rate, and boundary parameters, adapting to variations in speed, relative distance, and risk sensitivity to reflect diverse driving styles and risk preferences. By simulating high-risk scenarios with lateral, longitudinal, and multidimensional risk sources in a driving simulator, the proposed model accurately predicts cognitive responses and decision behaviors during emergency maneuvers. Specifically, by incorporating driver-specific risk sensitivity, the model enables dynamic adjustments of key DDM parameters, allowing for personalized decision-making representations in diverse scenarios. Comparative analysis with IDM, Gipps, and MOBIL demonstrates that DDM more precisely captures human cognitive processes and adaptive decision-making in high-risk scenarios. These findings provide a theoretical basis for modeling human driving behavior and offer critical insights for enhancing AV-human interaction in real-world traffic environments.