A Pilot Study on Situational Trust and Driver's Take Over Performance in High-Level of Autonomous Driving.

In this pilot study on autonomous driving, we explored the importance of situational trust and its effects on various factors such as sleepiness, state anxiety, mental workload, task difficulty, and driver's takeover performance in high-level automated driving. We used the SSAM model and involved six participants who experienced seven scenarios with different levels of difficulty using a driving simulator and VR headset. Participants responded to Takeover Requests (TORs), and we measured situational trust, sleepiness, state anxiety, mental workload, and takeover performance during the handover task. The results indicated that situational trust did not act as a mediator in the proposed SSAM model, suggesting its limited impact on the connections between variables. However, task difficulty was found to play a crucial role in handover tasks.