Driving activity takes place in a dynamic and constantly changing environment. The driver has to make his car evolving on the road while ensuring adequate interactions with its close environment and other road users. In order to perform this task, the driver has to perceive the environment he is evolving in, to interpret events in order to correctly understand the current driving situation, to be able to anticipate its evolution and take decisions regarding vehicle control in order to reach his short and long term goals safely. As a result, both complexity and variety of perceptual, cognitive and sensorimotor processes involved in the driving activity make it very rich context for cognitive sciences. The modeling of human cognition, a speci c method which belongs to cognitive sciences eld, has been chosen to study driver's activity aiming at understanding, explaining or even predicting it. This approach allows a representation and a description of the driver's cognitive system with di erent levels of granularity. Thus, such a model o ers only a theoretical description. When implemented on a computer, it opens the way to the simulation allowing the digital deployment of the theories involved in the cognitive model design. This thesis is focused on cognitive modeling of car driver, its implementation and its simulation using a virtual platform. The theoretical model that we implemented is COSMODRIVE, developed at IFSTTAR - LESCOT laboratory and the implementation platform we used for this, named SiVIC, is developed at IFSTTAR - LIVIC. This is the context where we started the computational development of the COSMODRIVE model in order to simulate the perceptual and cognitive activity of car driver. Indeed, we chose to limit our implementation to some crucial cognitive processes such as strategic functions (route planning and strategic plans execution), perceptual functions (exploration and integration of visual information), cognitive tactical functions (construction of mental representations, perceptual and cognitive integration of information, structuring of driving knowledge, etc.), or executive functions of actions (short control loop by envelopes zones or pursuit points). Through computer simulation, we used the numerical model as an innovative tool for scienti c investigation in the eld of cognitive sciences: The numerical simulation of cognitive functions identi ed and modeled by COSMODRIVE allowed us to de ne experimental hypotheses which leed us to conduct experiments in a driving simulator that we have built. To test the theoretical model and computer of the car driver, we compared the performance of human drivers on one hand and the predictions issued from the simulation on the other hand. It opens innovative opportunities for the development and the use of cognitive modeling and simulation of car driver.
