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The Psychological Processes of Learning to Drive
Presented by Name HereJob Title - Date
Presented by Neale KinnearSenior
Psychologist 30th Oct 2008
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RFC
Simply the Best
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Insert the title of your presentation here
The Psychological Processes of Learning to Drive
Presented by Name HereJob Title - Date
Presented by Neale KinnearSenior
Psychologist 30th Oct 2008
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The Graph of Death
Data from 30 OECD countries
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Relative Fatality Risk of Young Drivers
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What we have is a tragic trend that eclipses
cultural differences and a multitude of driver
licensing procedures.
How can this trend be explained?
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Influences on Novice Driver Crash Risk
What research tells us
Age Lack of experience Gender Over-confidence in
abilities Lifestyle and social attitudes Alcohol
and Drugs

• Poor Hazard Perception
• Physical Mental Development
• Expression
• Thrill seeking
• Peer influences
• Parents

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Age or Experience?
Maycock, Lockwood Lester (1991)
A study of British drivers licensed to drive at
different ages (i.e. 17, 20, 25, 36 50 years
respectively) who travelled about 12000kms per
year, found that crash risk during the first few
years of solo driving decreased by about 31 due
to age and about 59 due to experience.
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Influence of age and experience on accident
liability
Maycock (2002) Novice driver accidents and the
driving test
0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0
Male
Age
Female
Accident liability (accidents/year)
Experience Age
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Age
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Age versus Experience
Data from the Netherlands (Accidents per billion
kilometres)
Age
Experience Age
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Experience and Crashes Learners New Drivers
Data from Australia
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Hazard Perception Visual Scanning
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Capability
Inexperienced Driver
Task Difficulty
Speed
Hazard
Capability
Experienced Driver
Task Difficulty
Speed
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Hazard Perception Visual Scanning
What research tells us

• Novice drivers
• Perceive less holistically
• Perceive hazards less quickly
• Perform smaller horizontal scans
• Look closer to the front of the vehicle
• Check mirrors infrequently

• Glance at objects infrequently
• Utilise peripheral vision inefficiently
• Fixate on fewer objects
• Fixate more on stationary objects
• Are more likely not to perceive a hazard at all

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Police, Experienced Novice Drivers
Crundall et al (2003)

• Police drivers and experienced drivers spent
  significantly shorter time fixating on any
  particular point indicative of the reduced
  processing time required, resulting in a
  corresponding increase in the sampling rate of
  the visual scene
• Police drivers processed significantly more
  horizontal elements than that of the experienced
  drivers or the novices
• All driver groups cognitively rated the hazards
  the same
• but police drivers produced significantly more
  Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs) considered
  indicative of sudden increases in hazard
  awareness than both other groups.

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Hazard perception Visual Scanning
Decision Making Emotions
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Emotion, Feelings and Decision Making A Hot Topic
Peters et al (2006)

• The field of judgement and decision making long
  neglected the influence of emotions and feelings
  on decision behaviour in favour of cold
  deliberative and reason-based decision
  makingHowever, over the last ten years the field
  has turned its attention more and more to how
  feelings influence judgements and decisions.
• Feelings act as information to guide and bias
  judgement and decision processes. The feelings
  themselves are based on prior experience of
  situations.
• By translating complex scenarios into feelings,
  decision making can do without continuous
  conscious attention and reasoned logic.

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Modern Theories of Risk Appraisal
Slovic et al (2004)

• Modern theories in cognitive psychology and
  neuroscience indicate that there are two
  fundamental ways in which human beings comprehend
  risk
• The analytic system uses algorithms and
  normative rules, such as the probability
  calculus, formal logic, and risk assessment. It
  is relatively slow, effortful, and requires
  conscious control.
• The experiential system is intuitive, fast,
  mostly automatic, and not very accessible to
  conscious awareness. The experiential system
  enabled human beings to survive during their long
  period of evolution and remains today the most
  natural and most common way to respond to risk.
  It relies on images and associations, linked by
  experience to emotions (a feeling that something
  is good or bad). This system represents risk as a
  feeling that tells us whether it is safe to walk
  down a dark street or continue driving at a
  certain speed.

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What Drivers Tell Us
Focus group quotes (Fuller et al, 2007)

• I think your body knows youre outside your
  comfort zone. It just registers something and
  you say back again instantly, to whatever
  speed youre comfortable
• And again it was on the motorway, nobody else
  about, did it high speed for a couple of
  minutes, stopped whenever there was anything
  looking like it was getting too close. Just a
  bit too much sensory input for me, and a little
  bit too quick, even though feels like an empty
  road, it doesnt feel comfy
• Well, I could control the safety margins with
  the speed, I feel quite happy doing 80-85, but if
  something, if the weath.., if conditions got
  worse, if the rain gets heavier, then I would
  slow down, I would kinda back off.

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Hazard Perception Visual Scanning
Decision Making Affect
Frontal Lobe Research Theory
Understanding the Novice Driver Problem
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Are we teaching the wrong things?
Isler (2007)
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Frontal Lobe Driving Research
New Zealand
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New York Times 13 May 2007
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Cognitive Functions of the Human Prefrontal Cortex
Functions involve

• The ability to recognise future consequences
  resulting from current actions
• Selective attention
• Anticipation
• Emotion regulation
• Reasoning and decision making
• Processing event sequences
• Adaptiveness to new situations

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The Female Brain
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Somatic Marker Hypothesis
Damasio (2004)

• Damasio argues that unconscious processes take
  place before reasoning and a cost-benefit
  analysis.
• If, for example, a situation appears to be
  developing that could advance into something
  threatening or dangerous, a feeling of
  unpleasantness is produced in the body (i.e. a
  gut feeling). Damasio labels this a Somatic
  Marker soma being Greek for body.
• It is a marker because this bodily feeling will
  be marked against the developing scenario so that
  the organism will learn that should this scenario
  be built up again, the body can respond earlier

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Damasio (1994, p 174)
Somatic Markers

• Somatic markers (SM) are a special instance of
  feelings generated from secondary emotions. Those
  emotions and feelings have been connected by
  learning to predicted future outcomes of certain
  scenarios. When a negative SM is juxtaposed to a
  particular future outcome the combination
  functions as an alarm bellSMs may operate
  covertly (without coming to consciousness)
• (Damasio 1994, p174)

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Driving as you feel
An investigation of physiological responses to
developing hazards
Experiment 1
Experiment 2

• Still pictures
• Participants 20 Inexperienced
• (lt3 years)
• 20 Experienced
• (3 years)
• Measures Cognitive hazard ratings
• Skin Conductance Response (SCR)

• 12 DSA Hazard perception clips
• Participants 10 Learner
• 20 Inexperienced
• (lt3 years)
• 20 Experienced (3 years)
• Measures Cognitive hazard ratings
• Skin Conductance Response (SCR)

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Example Safe scenario
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Example Developing Hazard scenario
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Example Hazard scenario
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Experiment 1 Still pictures
Mean Cognitive Hazard Ratings
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Experiment 1 Still pictures
Frequency of Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs)
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
Mean Cognitive Hazard Ratings
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
Measurement Areas with example SCR response
Anticipatory
Event
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Critical Moment
3
Clip 10 20 year old Female, Experienced
Clip 10 20 year old Female, Learner
2
1
SCR (µS)
0
Anticipatory area
Event area
-1
15 seconds
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
Anticipatory Score Frequency of SCRs in
Anticipatory area
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
Anticipatory Score per clip
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
Inexperience split by number of years with a
license
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
Inexperience split by number of miles driven
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Experiment 2 DSA Hazard Perception clips
A learning curve?
Novice Driver Crash Risk
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Historical SCR and Driving Literature

• Hulbert (1957) Both reported that drivers
  demonstrated Michaels (1960) distinct measurable
  SCRs when driving and that they occurred
  relatively frequently
• Taylor (1964) Reported supporting Michaels
  results that observable traffic hazards were
  related to increases in SCR activity
• Helander (1978) Inferred that SCR precedes the
  release of the accelerator by 0.2secs and the
  pressing of the brake by 1.9secs.
• it is obvious that mental activity that gives
  rise to SCR precedes muscle tension and brake
  application p486

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Summary Conclusions

• With the young novice driver problem crossing
  cultural boundaries and licensing methods, the
  scope for a human element that we havent yet
  appreciated is distinctly plausible.
• Separating age from experience demonstrates a
  dramatic reduction in novice driver crash risk
  due to initial solo experience, at a time where
  no official tuition is taking place.
• Modern theory suggests learning to associate
  feelings with events in our environment is our
  naturally evolved risk appraisal system. The key
  aspect is that these associations must be learnt
  through experience.
• Our studies have demonstrated a link between
  anticipatory physiological appraisal of hazards
  and experience which would support neurological
  theory proposed by the likes of Damasio.
• The results could open the door to a new agenda
  for research and application to licensing and
  training. For example, can we generate the
  necessary experiences in simulated driving?

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Thank you Presented by Neale KinnearSenior
Psychologist Tel [phone] Mob [phone]
287 Email nkinnear_at_trl.co.uk