With the aging of the adult population, the number of drivers aged 60 and over has risen markedly throughout the world. A proportion of these older drivers may suffer from Alzheimer's disease (AD), from other progressive degenerative dementias, or from undetected, "incipient" dementia. A demonstration of the need for systematic investigations of attentional skills in relation to driving performance in older drivers with and without dementia is presented. Such investigations should focus on normal older adults and persons in the mild, early stages of dementia, because the latter are the most likely among the dementia population to be still driving. Evidence from a variety of diverse empirical studies is presented to indicate that: 1) Motor-vehicle accident rates per mile are higher in drivers with dementia than in normal older drivers. 2) Accident rates in normal youngand older drivers are related to performance information-processing measures of different components of attention. 3) This relationship is greatest for measures of the switching of selective attention. 4) Many of these same attentional functions, and particularly the switching of visual selective attention, are impaired in the early stages of Alzheimer's dementia and thus may contribute to increased accident risk. (A) This article was also published in Human Factors, Vol33 no 5, p539-557 1991 (IRRD 849746).
Abstract