Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people ride an autonomous car, they might feel anxiety because they cannot know how it may move. Addingartificially augmented signals, which represent coming changes of the vehicle, it may be useful to reduce anxiety by changeexpectation. Thus we executed an experiment examining whether ascending sound could decrease passenger’s anxiety, whileriding on virtual autonomous car. In the experiment, participants saw 360-degree computer-graphics world through a head-mounted-display. The stimuli were views from a moving car with 2 speed (19 and 320 km/h), half of which was addedascending and descending sound at first / last 6 secs. Results of the heart-wave analysis as biometric index, i.e., index ofsympathetic nervous (LF/HL), showed a marginal interaction between existence of sounds and the vehicle speed; while soundsreduced participants’ anxiety with high-speed condition, they showed higher tension with sound at slow-speed conditions.