Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

In this thesis, hazard anticipation is conceived as a precondition to perform
adequately on what Michon (1985) has defined as the tactical level of the
driving task. On the tactical level, drivers choose their speed and headway in
changing traffic situations. They more or less automatically take certain risks
when dealing with traffic situations (e.g. 'Shall I overtake that slow driving
car in front of me?' or 'Is the gap wide enough to turn left?').
Both of what is usually called hazard perception and the over
representation of young novice drivers in crashes, are not new topics in
traffic psychology. In the past decades a vast amount of studies have been
devoted to the novice driver problem and poor hazard perception has often
been mentioned as one of the causes of the high crash rate of young novice
drivers. Indeed, more than once an association has been found between poor
performance on a hazard perception task by mostly young novice drivers
and crash involvement (Congdon, 1999; Darby et al., 2009; McKenna &
Horswill, 1999; Pelz & Krupat, 1974; Quimby et al., 1986; Wells et al., 2008).
To date however, poor hazard anticipation has been viewed either as a
cognitive problem (i.e. not having the skill to detect, to recognize and to
predict hazards) or as motivational problem in terms of poor risk assessment,
poor self-assessment and the acceptance of high levels of risks. In this thesis,
an attempt is made to bridge the two different views. In order to do this the
phenomenon of hazard anticipation has been approached from a cognitiveneuropsychological
perspective. The key concept in this approach is mental
representation or schema. While driving schemata unfold in interaction with
external stimuli (i.e. what the driver perceives) and internal stimuli (i.e. what
the driver feels), the selected dominant schemata enable the driver to find
valid cues in the road and traffic situation and to anticipate forthcoming
events. Activation and inhibition of schemata and action selection most of the
times happen automatically, especially when the driver is an experienced
driver. Sometimes selection of schemata is controlled. To explain in more
detail how drivers anticipate hazards the framework of Brouwer & Schmidt
(2002) is applied. This framework was originally developed to provide
insight in the multiple causation of sometimes aberrant (driving) behaviours
dependent on underlying (brain) disorders and differences in expertise. The
framework describes the hypothetical sub-processes that are involved in
action selection by drivers and the interaction between these sub-processes.
Errors or omissions in action selection by drivers with mild Alzheimer's
disease could for example be the result of slow information processing of
content information and limited working memory capacity. On the other
hand in patients with mild frontotemporal dementia poor monitoring of the
risks involved in road and traffic situations and impaired inhibition of unsafe
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