Stress and Simulated Environments: Insights From Physiological Marker
DOI: 10.3389/frvir.2021.618855
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study investigates the relationship between simulated driving environments and physiological stress levels, specifically examining the roles of age, simulator adaptation, and prior experience with simulator sickness. The research was motivated by the potential for simulator-induced stress to negatively impact driving performance and the need to understand how individual factors influence this response. The authors hypothesized that previous adaptation to a simulator and prior sickness experiences would affect stress levels during subsequent simulator use. The study analyzed data from 164 participants (mean age 61.62 years, range 25–89) who completed a three-phase protocol. Phase T0 involved a baseline 25-minute drive in a mixed-road driving simulator to assess adaptation. Phase T1, conducted five days later, consisted of an online survey measuring simulator sickness symptoms. Phase T2, occurring approximately 12 weeks after T0, involved a second 40-minute drive on a highway-only scenario, with salivary cortisol samples collected before and after the drive to quantify acute stress responses. Driving performance was quantified using an Index of Performance (IOP) based on steering and lane drift metrics. Statistical analyses included Pearson correlations and hierarchical moderated regression to test the hypothesized model and interaction effects. The results indicated that the original hypothetical model was not supported. Driving performance did not correlate with stress levels or prior simulator sickness experience. However, age and previous experience with simulator sickness significantly predicted changes in cortisol levels following the simulated drive, accounting for 10.5% of the variance. Specifically, older age and higher sickness scores were associated with greater cortisol increases. Driving performance did not further explain stress-level changes beyond the effect of age. Additionally, there was no significant difference in pre-drive cortisol levels between participants who had previously adapted to the simulator and those who had not, suggesting that prior adaptation did not reduce anticipatory stress. The findings suggest that while driving performance in this specific highway scenario was not linked to physiological stress, age and history of simulator sickness are critical predictors of stress responses in simulated environments. The lack of effect from prior adaptation is attributed to the long interval between sessions, which likely prevented the transfer of adaptation benefits. The study highlights the importance of considering individual differences, particularly age and sickness susceptibility, in simulator research. It also notes limitations regarding the simplicity of the driving scenario and the exclusion of participants who dropped out due to sickness, recommending future studies include more complex scenarios and broader physiological measures.
Key finding
Age and previous experience with simulator sickness predict stress-level changes following a simulated drive, but driving performance does not correlate with stress levels or simulator sickness experience.
Methodology
simulator
Sample size: 164
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via author_sweep_intake on 2026-05-27.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-27 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-27 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
- stress driving
- simulator sickness
- simulator validity fidelity
- stress arousal performance
- simulator training transfer
- workload measurement
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: physiological data
- Methodological Resource: validation psychometrics, tool software