Autonomous personal mobility vehicle (APMV) is a new type of small smart vehicle designed for mixed-traffic environments, including interactions with pedestrians. To enhance the interaction experience between pedestrians and APMVs and to prevent potential risks, it is crucial to investigate pedestrians' walking behaviors when interacting with APMVs and to understand the psychological processes underlying these behaviors. This study aims to investigate the causal relationships between subjective evaluations of pedestrians and their walking behaviors during interactions with an APMV equipped with an external human-machine interface (eHMI). An experiment of pedestrian-APMV interaction was conducted with 42 pedestrian participants, in which various eHMIs on the APMV were designed to induce participants to experience different levels of subjective evaluations and generate the corresponding walking behaviors. Based on the hypothesized model of the pedestrian's cognition-decision-behavior process, the results of causal discovery align with the previously proposed model. Furthermore, this study further analyzes the direct and total causal effects of each factor and investigates the causal processes affecting several important factors in the field of human-vehicle interaction, such as situation awareness, trust in vehicle, risk perception, hesitation in decision making, and walking behaviors.

翻译：自主个人移动车辆（APMV）是一种新型小型智能车辆，专为混合交通环境设计，包括与行人的交互。为提升行人与APMV的交互体验并预防潜在风险，研究行人与APMV交互时的行走行为，并理解这些行为背后的心理过程至关重要。本研究旨在探究行人在与配备外部人机界面（eHMI）的APMV交互过程中，其主观评价与行走行为之间的因果关系。通过42名行人参与者进行的行人-APMV交互实验，设计了APMV上的多种eHMI以诱导参与者产生不同水平的主观评价及相应的行走行为。基于行人认知-决策-行为过程的假设模型，因果发现的结果与先前提出的模型一致。此外，本研究进一步分析了各因素的直接与总因果效应，并探讨了影响人车交互领域中若干重要因素（如情境意识、对车辆的信任、风险感知、决策犹豫及行走行为）的因果过程。