Modeling Social Situation Awareness in Driving Interactions

The design of self-driving vehicles requires an understanding of the social interactions between drivers in resolving vague encounters, such as at un-signalized intersections. In this paper, we make the case for social situation awareness as a model for understanding everyday driving interaction. Using a dual-participant VR driving simulator, we collected data from driving encounter scenarios to understand how (N=170) participant drivers behave with respect to one another. Using a social situation awareness questionnaire we developed, we assessed the participants' social awareness of other driver’s direction of approach to the intersection, and also logged signaling, speed and speed change, and heading of the vehicle. Drawing upon the statistically significant relationships in the variables in the study data, we propose a Social Situation Awareness model based on the approach, speed, change of speed, heading and explicit signaling from drivers.