Thaindian News

Washington, May 27 (ANI): Older drivers’ ability to detect hazards doesn’t degrade with age, says a new study, which showed that elderly drivers are more sensitive to potential hazards than young-inexperienced drivers.

The study from the Human Factors Safety Laboratory at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) suggests that driving experience improves drivers’ awareness of potential hazards and these drivers focus more on potentially risky situations, such as approaching an intersection or pedestrians on a curb, than young drivers.

The research involved 21 young-inexperienced, 19 experienced and 16 older drivers (37 years of experience) who viewed six hazard perception movies while connected to an eye tracking system and were requested to identify hazardous situations.

Four movies embedded planned, highly hazardous situations and the rest were used as control. The study showed that experienced and older-experienced drivers were equally proficient at hazard detection and detected potentially hazardous events continuously, whereas young-inexperienced drivers stopped reporting on hazards that followed planned, highly hazardous situations.

Moreover, while approaching T intersections, older and experienced drivers fixated more toward the merging road on the right, while young-inexperienced drivers fixated straight ahead, paying less attention to potential vehicles on the merging road.

“We found that with older drivers, in general, their hazard perception abilities remained intact. However, they relied heavily on signs and signals (i.e. signals from other vehicles) to cope with the traffic environment. In their verbal comments, however, older drivers tended to claim that the other road users were responsible for putting them at risk and rarely considered themselves as responsible for hazardous events,” said BGU researcher Avinoam Borowsky,

The study will be published in the July issue of Accident Analysis & Prevention. (ANI)