Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour
Unpacking older drivers’ maneuver at intersections: Their visual-motor coordination and underlying neuropsychological mechanisms
Section snippets
Background
The older population around the world is rapidly increasing (Matas, Nettelbeck, & Burns, 2014), as is the complexity of the traffic environment. Several studies have revealed a rising rate of car crashes in older drivers, aged 65 years and older (Evans, 1988, Fildes, 2006, Rakotonirainy et al., 2012). There was also an over-representation of older drivers in merging collisions, and in crashes at intersections, while turning and when changing lanes (Clarke et al., 2010, Marmeleira et al., 2012,
Participants
Data were collected for 38 older drivers (age 60–81, M = 68.65, SD = 5.92; 19 males and 19 females) from Perth, Western Australia. Participants were eligible for inclusion if they held a valid full driver's license; drove at least three times per week in the recent months, and reported no mental health or physical impairments that could impact their driving performance. Preliminary screening on vision and cognitive conditions was conducted for all participants to ensure compliance with
VMC performance at intersections in older drivers
By applying the DEA model, an overall index score for each driver was calculated based on multiple visual search and vehicle control parameters. The overall visual-motor coordination performance of participants is shown in Supplementary 6. It can be seen that Driver 26 (aged 68) performed best. The visual-motor coordination dataset (Supplementary 4) shows that the driver demonstrated relatively high fixation frequency per manoeuvre time (5.83/s), resulting in a low MLP (0.14 m) and SDLP
Discussion and conclusion
The results showed that the VMC assessment is able to identify under-performing drivers and their problematic visual, motor behaviors. Eye fixation frequency was lower in participants with lower VMC index, which resulted in poor lane maintenance performance. The lower VMC scores also reflected the inadequate traffic relevant fixations performed by participants during intersection manoeuvres.
However, the primary objective of this study was to determine which tests, from a clinical battery, were
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the GNSS Research Centre, Curtin University for providing base station reference data; thank the eye tracking analysis team from the School of Occupational Therapy and Social Work, Curtin University, for analysing eye tracking data; and thank the support from MOE (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China) Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation (Grant No. 16YJA840007).
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