Risk and the recognition of driving situations

This paper reports a series of experiments that explore the relationship between subjective risk when viewing driving situations and subsequent recognition memory for such films. In the first experiment no simple relationship was found between risk and recognition performance. Instead the experience of subjective risk was associated with good recognition of generally dangerous situations but poor recognition of generally safe ones. The remaining experiments replicated this result and explored possible reasons for it. An account of the results in terms of schema theory was tested and rejected. The effect is instead interpreted in terms of the types of information that are present and attended to in different kinds of dangerous situation. Overall recognition memory for films of driving situations was surprisingly poor, but the pattern of results was consistent with drivers showing good memory for central details from dangerous situations. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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