Event-related Potentials Correlates Of Bisk Perception

Technological progress constantly changes the way of modern production and daily lives, and brings unprecedented convenience to us. However, it’s also accompanied by increasing risks. Since China is still in the medium stage of industrialization process, it is confronted with great pressure from work safety issues. The losses and damage caused by risks in work safety have become one of the focus problems of our society, and have a great impact on economic development and social stability. Risk perception, which is a concept delineating the subjective feeling of the external objective risk, has become an important domain of research in safety management. Risk perception is the basis of individual and organizational risk attitude and decision making, which in a large extent shapes risky behavior.Existing researches have developed two mainstream theoretical frameworks to provide quantitative or qualitative descriptions of risk perception, i.e., the psychometric paradigm and the culture theory. But controversy still exists between the two frameworks, and they could not be generalized to diverse contexts or tasks, especially to contexts featured by contingency and impulsiveness. To further the understanding of risk perception, two issues need to be explored:1) How do people perceive and evaluate risky information behaviorally and neurally? 2) Does risk perception influence the following cognitive task performance, and if so, what’s the underlying mechanism? To this end, the current study combined survey study and experimental study, and examined the cognitive process and neural foundation of risk perception with Event-related potentials technique. The first study investigated the cognitive process of risk perception and risk evaluation for realistic operating environment, which offered important basis for the following two studies. The second study aimed to identifying if deceptive behavior influence risk evaluation, and was mainly focused on elucidating the behavioral and neural features of lying about risks. Finally, the third study probed the influence of risk perception on cognitive task performance.Based on these studies, the following main conclusions were drawn:1) The risk perception of realistic operating environment could be divided into two phases:a relative early automatic risk detection process which is reflected by N1 or P200, and a later and more effortful risk evaluation process which is reflected by P300 or LPP.2) Risk perception depends on intuition and experience. As N1 and P200 showed, neural differentiation occurred in the early stages of risk perception. The subjects do not have sufficient time to carry out deliberate and rational analysis in the time range shorter than 300 milliseconds. Moreover, high risk elicited larger P300 or LPP amplitudes in contrast to low risk, which signaled the retrieval of emotional experience and risk evaluation. The early fast attentional process and the later emotional significance both confirm that risk perception depends upon intuitive process.3) Deceptive behavior influences the risk evaluation process. Lying about safe stimuli was more difficult than lying about risky stimuli, because when cognitive resources were limited, risky stimuli were allocated with more resources in contrast to safe stimuli, which facilitate the memory and monitoring of risky stimuli and the inhibition of authentic responses. Such effects were observed both in behavioral and neural levels.4) Risk perception modulates the Simon effect. Compared with low risk, high risk dampened Simon effect, demonstrating improved cognitive control under high risk. When high risk and conflict both existed, more attentional resources will be allocated to the conflict, which heightened the speed of conflict processing. The moderating effect was observed both in reaction time and P300.The current study combined survey study and experimental study, which was a new attempt in research methodology and deepened our understanding on risk perception. The contributions and theoretical innovations are illustrated as follows:1) It expanded the research of risk perception to the realistic operating environment and provided important extension for existing theory.2) It provided revision for Hazard Perception Two-stage Model through cognitive neuroscience research methodology, which improved the general izability of HPTS model.3) It offered supplement to the influence factors of risk perception by examining the influence of deceptive behavior on risk evaluation.4) Based on operating tasks in risky context, the current study revealed the moderating effect of risk perception on Simon effect, which was a significant extension of risk perception studies and made a contribution to real-world applications.