Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

for experienced drivers even in circumstances with imminent hazards, no
increased activity was found in the PFC (Spiers & Maguire, 2007). This also is
in support of the existence of a CS and is also in support of what is described
in Section 3.8.1 about how based on the framework experienced drivers may
anticipate familiar hazards without involvement of SAS. Only one
neuroimaging study could be found about brain activities during simulated
driving in situation with a latent hazard (Callan et al., 2009). Callan et al.
(2009) conducted an experiment in which fourteen drivers between 21-46
years of age and with at least 3 years of driving experience, watched an
animated clip from the driver's perspective of the situation that is depicted in
Figure 3.9. In this scenario, the driver turns left at an intersection while, the
view on oncoming traffic is blocked by an opposing lorry. As this experiment
was conducted in Japan, which has left-hand traffic, the driver in the clip
turned right. The experiment here is described for right-hand traffic. The
participants watched this clip while lying in an apparatus for functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Participants had to imagine that they
were the driver. The clip stopped and the screen turned black just at the
moment where the driver in the clip is about to turn left. Participants could
indicate with their left hand it they would move forward in this situation
(make the turn) or not. Participants viewed versions of the clip with the
opposing lorry and without the opposing lorry and no oncoming traffic. Data
about the decisions of the participants were not provided in the study.
However, another group of participants (outside the scanner) indicated that
they felt more anxiety in the situation where the view was blocked by the
lorry than in the situation the view was not blocked by the lorry.
Significantly greater brain activity was found in the anterior circulate cortex,
the insula, the amygdala, the inferior parietal lobule, the hippocampus and
the caudate, but again not in the PFC. These results confirm what is
described in Section 3.8.1, about how, based on the framework, experienced
drivers may anticipate known latent hazards. The SN (salience network) is
active in the situation of the blocked view (i.e. increased activity in particular
in the insula), but the SAS is not switched on. The risk is probably
immediately subconsciously felt, after which the CS automatically selects the
elaborate dominant schema. This enabled recognition and anticipation of the
latent hazard without influence of the SAS.
The involvement of the PFC and in particular the DLPFC when driving, was
studied by Beeli et al. (2008). In this study male drivers between 20 and 30
years of age (mean age was 24.7) drove in a simulator while the DLPFC was
externally activated or inhibited by a 'transcranial Direct Current
104