Detection of collision events by older and younger drivers.

Recently it has been found that older drivers had poorer performance than younger drivers at detecting an impending collision during braking. In the present study, whether older drivers have poorer performance than younger drivers at detecting a collision with a moving object was examined. 22 older and younger drivers were presented with computer generated scenes of a roadway in a driving simulator. Located in the scene was a single object that moved independently of the vehicle motion and that was or was not on a collision path with the vehicle. Overall older drivers were less sensitive to detect a collision than younger drivers, with performance worse for long than for short time to contact (TTC) conditions.