The chance of being involved in a serious traffic accident increases with age. This increasing risk is may be caused by the broadly documented functional decline of older people, which is especially manifested in (complex) dual-task situations. Since traffic participation also requires the performance of relatively complex tasks with many dual-task characteristics (e.g., car driving), the present study was aimed at gaining more insight in the underlying mechanisms causing problems of the older in dual-tasks situations. This paper describes a series of experiments carried out on 2 groups, each of 12 drivers with mean ages of 70 and 27, in the driving simulator of TNO Institute for Perception. The subjects Perception. The subjects were presented with steering tasks and car-following tasks, and steering tasks combined with car-following tasks. On concluded that the problems older drivers encounter are not caused by the invariant components of the driving task which usually are learned long before old age. These problems may merely be created by variations in the driving task, such as removal to another city, changing regulations, changing layouts of intersections, or the purchase of a new car.
Abstract