Die Entwicklung verkehrssicherheitsrelevanter Personenmerkmale im höheren Lebensalter und ihre Einflussfaktoren

There are various personal characteristics that can influence people‘s driving behaviour and driving skills. These include not only personality traits and a person‘s self-image, but also perceptual, motor and cognitive abilities, personal driving history, attitudes, consciously or unconsciously employed compensatory strategies and also a person‘s objective life situation. All of these personal characteristics can change in the course of a person‘s life and - depending on their nature and extent - can affect driving behaviour and thus also driving ability and driving competence. Within the framework of a longitudinal study designed for several years, it is being investigated whether and how these personal characteristics relevant to road safety change in older age and what influence they (and other factors) can have on driving behaviour and thus also on individual and general road safety. To this end, more than 480 people aged 67 to 76 were invited to drive in a driving simulator up to four times at intervals of 12-15 months. Neurophysiological parameters (EEG) were recorded at each measurement point and various characteristics relevant to road safety were collected by means of questionnaires and cognitive performance tests. This report contains the first results of the cross-sectional evaluation of the data collected from the test persons at the first measurement point. This includes, among other things, personality traits (Big Five), self-image, compensation strategies as well as information on the objective life situation and demographic data. With the help of psychometric tests, various cognitive abilities such as sensory motor skills, reaction time, various facets of attention (including divided attention, distractibility, flexibility) as well as visual search and the ability to observe / gain an overview in traffic-relevant environments were recorded. The driving behaviour of the test persons was recorded in the driving simulator on a driving route with average to high demand character specially developed for this study and evaluated on the basis of various performance dimensions, which are oriented towards the TRIP protocol - also used for the assessment of driving performance in real traffic. These performance dimensions were transformed into two so-called target variables, the first of which combines various individual parameters into a risk index (target variable I) and a second of which contains significant violations of the road traffic regulations (target variable II) committed by the test subjects while driving. In the first cross-sectional analyses of these data, which included various procedures such as multiple linear regression, discriminant analysis and binary logistic regression, a manageable number of variables crystallised as classifiers or predictors. These were mainly the constancy of attentional focus, the ability to gain an overview and, as personality traits, emotional stability or lability, the self-attribution of driving competence and, finally, age and gender. The explained variance is in the low single-digit percentage range (3.2% to 7.5%). It remains to be seen whether these variables will also hold up as the strongest predictors in the longitudinal analyses. For in the ageing process, the network structure of the biopsychological competences we studied can change with behaviour and attitudes. This can certainly have an impact on driving behaviour and accident risk, so that the regression and discriminant models of the first measurement point do not remain constant.