Improving older drivers' hazard perception ability

Abstract

One reason that older drivers may have elevated crash risk is because they anticipate hazardous situations less well than middle-aged drivers. Hazard perception ability has been found to be amenable to training in young drivers. This article reports an experiment in which video-based hazard perception training was given to drivers who were between the ages of 65 and 94 years. Trained participants were significantly faster at anticipating traffic hazards compared with an untrained control group, and this benefit was present even after the authors controlled for pretraining ability. If future research shows these effects to be robust, the implications for driver training and safety are significant.