Control motivation and driving experience among young drivers.

Among all motivational factors (transient motivation, personality and attitudes towards driving), it is crucial to know which skills are more sensitive to the effects of transient motivational factors, particularly when drivers are novices. Little is known about this topic because of the difficulty of observing intra-individual transient variations of motivation and the difficulty of organising the observations in a coherent theoretical frame. The authors focused on transient motivational factors, extrinsic to driving. Drivers sometimes find themselves at the wheel following a happy or unhappy event related to their work or their social and family life. Differences in the allocation of attention, changes in a decision or in the carrying out of a decision can therefore occur. These effects might be understood in the light of motivational consequences of loss of control. The authors' purpose is to examine, among young drivers, the effects of a transient variation in control motivation, extrinsic to driving, on decisions related to simulated driving situations. The experience of young drivers is explored as a factor which could allow better regulation of drivers' motivational states in relation to the demands of the task.