Which Cognitive Tasks Predict Traffic Accidents in Professional Drivers? Comparison between Middle-Aged and Older Drivers
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Abstract
While most research on safe driving has focused on young adults and the elderly, professional drivers are typically middle-aged or older adults. To address this gap, we examined differences in cognitive functions between middle-aged and older adult drivers and identified which tasks predicted traffic accidents for each group. We administered tasks related to Useful Field of View, Visuomotor Speed, Spatial Judgment, Visual Working Memory, and Multitasking to each group and compared their performance with traffic accident records from the past 5 years. Results showed that older drivers performed significantly worse than middle-aged drivers on all cognitive tasks except Visuomotor Speed (p < .10), which was measured using a foot-pedal. We also found that cognitive function tasks could predict traffic accidents in both groups. Our findings suggest the need to include middle-aged drivers in research on safe driving, and to develop tailored driving aptitude tests that reflect the needs of this population.
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