Pre-Frontal Cortex Activity of Male Drivers in the Presence of Passengers During Simulated Driving: An Exploratory Functional Near- Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Study
DOI: 10.17077/drivingassessment.1550
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Summary
This study addresses the increased risk of motor vehicle crashes among teenage drivers, particularly males, when peer passengers are present. While previous research indicates that peers heighten reward sensitivity and risk-taking in adolescents, the neural mechanisms underlying this effect during driving remain unclear. Traditional neuroimaging methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lack ecological validity for driving studies due to strict movement and environmental constraints. To overcome this, the authors tested the feasibility of using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive technique that allows for continuous brain monitoring during realistic tasks, to measure prefrontal cortex activity in drivers. The experiment employed a within-subject design with twelve young male adults (aged 25–29) who drove in a desktop simulator under two conditions: alone and with a male confederate passenger. The passenger was instructed to remain passive to isolate the effect of mere presence. Participants encountered ten "dilemma zone" scenarios involving yellow lights at signalized intersections, requiring rapid risk-based decisions. Brain activity was recorded using a custom 3D-printed headgear with 19 channels targeting the prefrontal cortex, including the ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and orbitofrontal regions. Data were preprocessed to calculate changes in oxygenated hemoglobin concentration, focusing on the 16-second window surrounding each intersection event. Behavioral analysis revealed no significant difference in stopping rates between the solo and passenger conditions; participants stopped at yellow lights at similar frequencies regardless of passenger presence. However, neural data showed statistically significant differences in brain activation. Drivers exhibited higher activation in the left and right medial prefrontal cortex when approaching yellow lights with a passenger compared to driving alone. These regions are associated with active risky decision-making, voluntary decision-making, and response inhibition. The findings demonstrate that fNIRS is a feasible method for monitoring driver brain activity in simulated environments, offering higher ecological validity than fMRI. Although outward driving behavior did not change, the increased neural activation in the medial prefrontal cortex suggests that the presence of a passenger alters the cognitive processing and neural engagement associated with risk assessment and decision-making. This study provides foundational evidence for using fNIRS to investigate the neural correlates of driver risk, particularly in adolescent populations, and supports future research with larger samples and higher ecological validity, such as naturalistic driving studies.
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-08-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| enrich | failed | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-08-09 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-nvidia | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 10 | 2026-08-11 |
| verify | partial | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-08-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-nvidia on 2026-08-10; verification: verified_with_issues.
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- Empirical Findings: physiological data
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- Theoretical Contribution: computational model