Building Driver’s Trust in Lane Change Assistance Systems by Adapting to Driver’s Uncertainty States

Driver's uncertainty during decision-making in overtaking results in long reaction times and potentially dangerous lane change maneuvers. Current lane change assistance systems focus on safety assessments providing either too conservative or excessive warnings, which influence driver's acceptance and trust in these systems. Inspired by the emancipation theory of trust, we expect systems providing information adapted to driver's uncertainty states to simultaneously help to reduce long reaction times and build the overall trust in automation. In previous work, we presented an adaptive lane change assistance system based on this concept utilizing a probabilistic model of driver's uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate whether the proposed system is able to improve reaction times and build trust in the automation as expected. A simulator study was conducted to compare the proposed system with an unassisted baseline and three reference systems not adaptive to driver's uncertainty. The results show while all systems reduce reaction times compared to the baseline, the proposed adaptive system is the most trusted and accepted.