Construction of critical speed threshold model based on psychophysiological perception of driver for road tunnels and analysis of perception mechanism

In order to investigate the effects of speed information on the perception ability of drivers in the lighting environments of road tunnels, this study collected various psychophysiological data under different tunnel and driving speed through simulation experiments and real vehicle experiments. Subsequently, the characteristics of psychophysiology changes were analyzed, and a critical speed threshold model for dividing the static perception and the dynamic perception of drivers was constructed based on the ROC curve method, and then the proposed critical speed threshold was validated using second-order clustering method. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms of static perception and dynamic perception were theoretically analyzed. The results indicate that the critical speed thresholds for dividing static perception and dynamic perception under the conditions of straight-short tunnel, straight-long tunnel, and spiral-short tunnel are 21.3 km/h, 27.2 km/h, and 25.6 km/h, respectively. Under static perception condition, for every 10 km/h increase in driving speed range, the pupil area, heart rate growth rate, visual recognition distance, and reaction time change by 6.5 %, 8.2 %, 4.3 %, and 1.3 %, respectively. Under dynamic perception condition, for every increase of 10 km/h in the driving speed range, the pupil area, heart rate growth rate, visual recognition distance, and reaction time change by 11.1 %, 9.8 %, 10.3 %, and 10.1 %, respectively.