Modelling Real-Life Cycling Decisions in Real Urban Settings Through Psychophysiology and LLM-Derived Contextual Data

TL;DR

This study combines physiological data and LLM-derived contextual descriptions to analyze how urban environments and traffic influence cyclists' emotional states and behaviors in Santiago, Chile.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid model integrating physiological and semantic environmental data to understand emotional triggers behind cycling decisions in real urban settings.

Findings

Cycling decisions are affected by stress-related emotions.

Urban characteristics significantly impact cyclist behavior.

Physiological and contextual data improve understanding of emotional influences.

Abstract

Measuring emotional states in transportation contexts is an emerging field. Methods based on self-reported emotions are limited by their low granularity and their susceptibility to memory bias. In contrast, methods based on physiological indicators provide continuous data, enabling researchers to measure changes in emotional states with high detail and accuracy. Not only are emotions important in the analysis, but understanding what triggers emotional changes is equally important. Uncontrolled variables such as traffic conditions, pedestrian interactions, and infrastructure remain a significant challenge, as they can have a great impact on emotional states. Explaining the reasons behind these emotional states requires gathering sufficient and proper contextual data, which can be extremely difficult in real-world environments. This paper addresses these challenges by applying an innovative approach, extracting contextual data (expert annotator level) from recorded multimedia using large language models (LLMs). In this paper, data are collected from an urban cycling case study of the City of Santiago, Chile. The applied models focus on understanding how different environments and traffic situations affect the emotional states and behaviors of the participants using physiological data. Sequences of images, extracted from the recorded videos, are processed by LLMs to obtain semantic descriptions of the environment. These discrete, although dense and detailed, contextual data are integrated into a hybrid model, where fatigue and arousal serve as latent variables influencing observed cycling behaviors (inferred from GPS data) like waiting, accelerating, braking, etc. The study confirms that cycling decisions are influenced by stress-related emotions and highlights the strong impact of urban characteristics and traffic conditions on cyclist behavior.