How Does Age Affect Our Safety

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How Does Age Affect Our Safety?

• James A Thomson,
• University of Strathclyde

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• Early and middle childhood
• Late childhood and adolescence
• The later years

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Underlying Factors

• Knowledge
• Attitudes
• Skill

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Can Childrens Traffic Behaviour be Improved
Through Training?

• Sandels (1975) It is not possible to adapt
  fully young children (under 10 years) to the
  traffic environment. It are biologically
  incapable of managing its many demands.
• Björklid (1998) Children below the age of 12
  lack the developmental apparatus needed for
  consistently safe behaviour in traffic.

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Proposed Constraints on Child Development

• Unable to understand others perspectives
  (Egocentrism)
• Difficulty in making judgements that rely on
  combining variables (e.g., speed and distance)
• Difficulty in dividing attention between tasks
• Difficulty in perceiving causal relationships

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Piagets Stage Theory of Development

• Development proceeds by way of four main stages
• All stages must be passed through, and in a fixed
  order.
• The stages occur at approximately the same age in
  all children and in all cultures
• This has often led to the conclusion that the
  development of cognitive functioning is
  biologically determined and not readily affected
  by learning. Children can therefore only be
  taught certain things when they are ready

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Perspective Based on Misinterpretation of
Piagets (1955) Stage Theory

• Pre-operational stage defined as ending at age 7,
  not 12
• Progress through the stages a matter of
  experience, not biological maturation
• Ages intended only as a rough guide
• Piaget much less wedded to the notion of uniform
  developmental stages

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Evidence against Fixed Constraints (Whitebread
Neilson, 1996)
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Aspects of childrens thinking that need to be
addressed

• Meta-cognition (e.g., strategic thinking,
  planning, self-monitoring)
• Use of rules
• Generalisation and context dependency

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Solution

• Focus on behaviour and underlying skills
• Train in appropriate contexts
• Develop strategic thinking and conceptual
  understanding
• This can accelerate pedestrian skill development
  by several years (e.g., Thomson Whelan, 1996)

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Limitations on Training

• Pedestrian training cannot raise performance to
  100 safety
• But aim of education should not be to turn out
  finished articles, especially given the amount
  of input that is feasible
• This expectation would not be held about any
  other educational programme

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More Realistic Goals

• Reduce probability of poor decisions by any
  margin that is feasible. Any improvement is
  valuable
• In fact, small amounts of training can bring
  about substantial improvements
• Help children become safe and autonomous
  learners. Training does not mean sudden freedom,
  but continued supervision
• Training should enable children to become more
  attentive and aware supervisees
• Prepare them for when they become unsupervised
  as in driver education

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Conclusion

• Education has a distinctive and vital role to
  play in reducing child pedestrian accidents.
• Children as young as 5 years do benefit from such
  education. But independent travel in the
  short-term is not a realistic goal. Continued
  supervision remains essential.
• The aim should be to improve childrens safety in
  the short-term by whatever amount is possible.
  But educational objectives must be essentially
  long-term.

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Pedestrian Safety in Adolescence

• A time of transition
• Parental versus peer group influence
• Norm-breaking
• Risk a good idea?
• Therefore attitudes probably of much greater
  importance than in younger children

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Challenges for the Adolescent Pedestrian

• Exposure to traffic
• Complexity of the traffic environment
• Existing skill levels therefore under pressure
• Are those skill levels adequate?

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Skill Levels in Adolescence

• Competence of this group may be over-estimated
• Natural tendency to over-estimate own skill
  (Svenson, 1981)
• Illusion of control (McKenna, 1993)

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Conclusion

• Need to assess pedestrian skill levels in this
  age group bearing in mind the more complex
  traffic environment with which they will
  interact.
• Perceived behavioural control do children in
  this age group over-estimate their skill more
  than younger or older children?
• Attitudes and social norms in this age group need
  investigation.

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The older pedestrian

• Speed of information processing declines with age
  (Salthouse, 1991)
• - reaction time
• - speed/accuracy trade-off
• Increasing task complexity affects older people
  disproportionately (Cerella, 1985)
• - decision times
• - divided attention
• Effects of cognitive load more marked where task
  is novel or unfamiliar (Rabbitt Maylor, 1991)
• Lapses (Rabbitt, 1983)

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Compensating for the effects of ageing

• Many of these age effects disappear after
  practice (Rabbitt, 1980)
• The effects are less marked in highly skilled
  activities (chess, bridge). Limited impact model
  (Maylor, 1994)
• Evidence of meta-cognitive awareness and strategy
  adaptation
• - trade off speed for accuracy
• - forward planning and anticipation
• - extra caution following errors
• Individual differences more marked than in
  general population (Rabbitt, 1983)

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Conclusions

• Needs more investigation in the context of driver
  and pedestrian behaviour
• Importance of self-monitoring
• Possibility that adaptive strategies might be
  promoted to overcome some of these problems