Identifying and Remedying Failures of Selective Attention in Younger Drivers

Newly licensed drivers are disproportionally involved in fatal crashes, and there is evidence that failure to attend to potentially relevant information is a major contributor to this problem. Corroborating this, in controlled scenarios on a driving simulator, we have found that younger drivers attend to (i.e., fixate) target regions in the virtual world that contain information about potential risks much less frequently than do more experienced drivers. We have developed a PC-based training program that substantially improves younger drivers' attention to these regions in the driving simulator and have recently replicated these training results on the road in a real driving situation.