Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

the middle of the piece or play variations on the theme. She thinks that the
performance at the procedural stage is generated by procedural
representations that are simply run off in their entirety (see the concept of
schemata in Section 3.4). It is only later after more practicing but also because
of rethinking of what one is actually doing, that one can interrupt the piece
and start at for instance the third bar without having to go back to the
beginning and repeat the entire procedure from the beginning. The ability to
play variations on the theme requires even more practicing and rethinking.
Karmiloff-Smit (1992) hypothesised that this is not because of improvement
in behavioural mastery but because of improvement of the mental
representations that generate the skills (i.e. improvement in schemata). This
is what she called the process of 'representational redescription'. Suppose
that based on simple representations a driver applies her or his skills more or
less automatically and unexpectedly a dangerous situation occurs. Then the
driver may start to rethink why she or he has applied these skills. The result
of this rethinking is that her or his mental representations (schemata) that
generate automatic task execution become more elaborate and flexible.
Studies on differences between experts and novices in detection and
recognition tasks have shown that experts can see patterns and perceive the
underlying structure of a situation that novices cannot. When however
confronted with completely novel situations in which even the elaborated
schemata of experts are not of any help to comprehend the situation,
detection of patterns by experts can be worse than detection of patterns by
novices (see Chi, 2006 for an overview). Experts spend proportionately more
time on how a novel situation can be comprehended with existing
knowledge and much less time in implementing a strategy for the solution
than novices. This is relevant for hazard detection. The differences between
novices and experts with regard to the detection and recognition of potential
hazards are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
The conclusion of the theory discussed so far is that generally not all topics
relevant for safe driving are addressed in basic driver training. Furthermore,
of the skills that are learned such as manoeuvring the vehicle and mastering
common traffic situations, skill performance may look like as if the
procedural stage is reached, but this is probably not true. Of what is
described by Karmiloff-Smith (1992) as the process of 'representational
rediscription' has presumably not yet started when learner drivers pass the
driving test.
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