Is trust a belief, observation, or state: Results from an active inference analysis of driver-automation transitions of control

Abstract

Transitions of control are an important safety concern for human-automation teams and automated vehicle safety. While trust and situation awareness have been observed to influence transitions of control in automated vehicles, there are few objective measurements, making these concepts difficult to operationalize in increasingly automated decision systems. In this study, we take a step towards quantifying trust by mapping latent driver beliefs extracted from an active inference-factor analysis model of driver behavior and cognitive dynamics to subjective responses to trust questionnaires. Our results show that subjective trust is primarily correlated with model parameters affecting perceptual evidence accumulation rate, and the same parameters are significantly correlated with driver age.