Reactive and predictive processes during unpredictable driving hazards in virtual reality: an exploratory brain and body study with multimodal neurophysiological monitoring

Authors

Cannard, C., Demet Yesilbas, D.

Abstract

Objective. Whether the brain differentiates hazardous from non-hazardous events before they occur, without predictive cues, remains contested: reported effects are small, often difficult to replicate, and obtained from paradigms in which hundreds of static images are presented on a black screen in a laboratory room. Prior electroencephalography (EEG) studies reporting such pre-stimulus differentiation have also been limited by non-causal filtering, pseudorandom sequences and uncontrolled temporal expectancy. We asked when discriminative neural information about an unpredictable collision becomes available in an ecologically valid setting, and whether a dry-electrode headset built into a virtual reality display can resolve it. Approach. Sixteen participants passively observed an immersive driving simulation while EEG and photoplethysmography were recorded from a wearable multimodal headset. Each of 120 trials ended in a collision or no collision, assigned independently at 50% probability by a quantum random number generator. EEG was filtered with a minimum-phase causal filter, without baseline correction. Mass-univariate hierarchical general linear models with permutation cluster correction were applied to length-matched pre- and post-stimulus windows, in the time and time-frequency domains; classification used leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. Main results. Two post-stimulus clusters differentiated the conditions, the largest peaking at 451.6 ms (d = -1.35), with broadband power modulation that replicated across two normalisations and was decoded from held-out participants with up to 93.8% accuracy. In the pre-stimulus window no time-domain cluster formed and classification remained at chance (all p [≥] 0.57), while a broadband spectral difference survived cluster correction under both normalisations and every preregistered control analysis (Section 3.5). Heart rate differentiated the conditions neither alone nor when added to the classifier. Significance. Differentiation of collision events was evoked and decodable after stimulus onset, while in the pre-stimulus window a broadband spectral difference survived correction and passed every preregistered control; the preregistered anticipatory hypothesis thus found support in the time-frequency domain only. Its shape, a sustained offset rather than a transient preceding onset, constrains interpretation without settling it; given the small sample and the exploratory window selection, it is a target for replication rather than a finding. Because data collection ended early, all findings are exploratory. A wearable dry-electrode system can resolve robust event-related responses to naturalistic threat inside virtual reality, and the paradigm is ready for adequately powered replication.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 01 Oct 2026.

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