It is indeed true driving is highly dependent on the effective use of selective visual attention, automatic and voluntary attention, and focused and divided attention along with bottom up and top down factors, in order to maintain safety on our roads. Moreover, the role of Occupational Therapy can also be said to be a major factor in maintaining mobility and quality of life.
It is known that age and experience can greatly influence bottom up and top down processes in relation to attention while driving. In general, older drivers are said to have decreased abilities regarding bottom up processing in comparison to novice drivers (Castro, 2008). Young drivers process their surrounding envrionment in an effective way, but lack the experience
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Selective visual attention can be described as a spotight, meaning ‘everything within a small region of the visual field can be seen clearly, however, anything that does not fall within the beam of the attentional spotlight is much harder to see’ (Eysenk and Keane, 2005, p.p 150). An example of selective attention in driving would be how individuals often tend to selectively focus their attention more on cars, trucks and buses rather than bicycles and mototcycles (Hole, 2007). This is due to the fact that over time they have built up the expectation that most oncoming traffic will consist of larger vehicles rather than cyclists. As a result of this expectation, many drivers will somewhat disregard motorcyclists when pulling out at a junction, causing an accident. (Hole, 2007, pp 54). Mourant and Rockwell’s studies (1770, 1972) are based on what drivers tend to look out for or focus their attention on while driving (Hole, 2007). It was shown that novice drivers attentional beam tended to be a lot narrower than that of older, more experienced drivers. They also noticed that young drivers appeared to fix their attention on road markings in an attempt to steer the car, rather than using other information from their peripheral vision in conjunction. By doing this, novice drivers put their own saftey and the safety of other road users at risk, as paying attention to the road markings alone gave rise to road traffic accidents, especially when changing lanes (Hole, 2007). After taking these situations into consideration, it it clear how selective visual attention are involved in driving and road traffic
Statistics show 16- to 17-year-old driver death rates increase with each additional passenger, which is due to distracted driving. Taking your eyes off the road for 2 (two) seconds, at 60 mph, means you have driven blindly for half the length of a football field. The risk of fatality is 3.6 times higher, when they are driving with passengers than when alone. For many years, the correlation between driving behavior and age has interested highway safety researchers and administrators. It is general knowledge that the greatest risk of motor vehicle crash...
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
Another negative effect that mobile phones impair is mental focus while driving. People who are driving have their minds on the task in front of them with their full attention on the road. So when a person is conversing on a phone their attention is split as he or she is trying to multi-task both talking and driving at the same time. An article written by Nathan Seppa, the cause of “split attention”, he noted that David Strayer a psychology professor and his team studied to understand what impairs drivers when they talk on the phone. They conducted an experiment with drivers to see the effects of how varies distractions compare to each other. Strayer’s team accompanied drivers and assign them different distractive tasks while they maintain their eyes on the road in order to assess the effects. In the team’s findings they found that one most distracting tasks was talking on a mobile phone, which caused a driver’s performance to decline significantly. The typical tasks that drivers should perform on a regular basis, such as observing traffic changes, looking in rear-view mirrors, and watching for pedestrians was reduced overall (Seppa). Not many people can multi-task a conversation and driving at the same time without some drawbacks. Another drawback to a person focus was “unintentional blindness”, described by Simons, as “looking at something and not seeing it” (Seppa). So a person who is talking on a phone can end up not seeing an object whether it is a car, a stop sign or a pedestrian that is right in front of him and her. Many experiments were conducted by professionals to understand how “unintentional blindness” can affect a person’s perception, but one notable professional, Simmons, conducted a test of this concept:
J., & Jeans, R. (2017). Change detection in urban and rural driving scenes: Effects of target type and safety relevance on change blindness. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 100, 111-122. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2017.01.011
William James, an American psychologist, proposed the first theory of what we now call “selective attention”. Selective attention is the assumption that in order to focus on one activity going on in your environment, you must hinder all other tasks occurring in the background. A good illustration of this would be to block out the music playing for the sake of progress on school work. This is referred to as the spotlight theory. In premise, your visual attention works like a spotlight. There is a focal point, or place or concentration. Beyond the focal point is considered to be fringe; seen by the viewer, but not observed clearly. Outside of the focal point and fringe is surplus and not viewed at all (Cherry, 2014).
I find the fact that distracted driving has caused so many deaths exceedingly tragic, however it should not surprise me. Additionally I’m inclined to the view that this issue – unfortunately - has become a more controversial problem in proportion to earlier. I don’t think that there exists a specifically solution in relation to this problem – if so not yet - however I’m convinced that there eventually has to b...
Today’s society appears to be constantly on the go. People seem to be pulled in multiple directions at once. Individuals never appear to have enough time to complete tasks that continually accumulate. It can be difficult to criticize someone that tries to make the most out every minute. Unfortunately, some of today’s drivers show a lack of judgment and trying to perform other tasks, while behind the wheel. People may feel this is best use time while getting to a destination. Occasionally, the small amount of time that people are trying to gain results in a time consuming accident. With modern conveniences that are geared toward an on the go public, individuals appear to be too preoccupied to driving safely.
In the 21st century, our nation is facing a major issue, causing teenagers to lose their lives at the hand of the wheel due to inexperienced driving. “Teen drivers between the ages of 16 and 19 are four times more likely than older drivers to be involved in an automobile crash,” and statistics show. Automobile accidents are the number one cause of teen deaths. Driving regulations are in high need to be changed in order for teenagers to gain more experience with driving before taking the driving test, which could help save countless adolescence’s lives.
Selective attention is when a person focuses on their conscious awareness on a particular stimulus. The person only attends to one or a few tasks at one time, this is necessary to keep the person from being overloaded with information. One of the main functions of attention is selective hearing, which attends to some stimuli and ignores others.
From the March 2003 invasion of Iraq until September of 2006, about 2,600 American troops were killed in combat and war-related incidents (Wilson 18). Did you know during that same 41-month period, more than 22,000 teenagers, ages 15 to 19, died in traffic accidents on U.S. roads? (Wilson 18). That number has now escalated to approximately 4,500 soldiers and over 40,000 teens lost. Parents in the United States have relied on driver’s education and training to prepare their teens for the responsibility of driving. In fact, we rely too much on driver’s education. Recent studies have indicated that driver’s education, or DE, has failed to produce safe drivers. Even though the common form of driver’s education and training has been cited as ineffective, there are efforts being made around the country that have the ability to profoundly change driver education as we know it and prepare young drivers, create safer drivers, and ultimately save teen lives.
Teens need to be taught that driving is a task that is complex and demanding. Parents know how much experience a young driver has, and they know exactly how inconvenient it is when they have to drive with their teen everywhere while they have their permit. Teens tend to cause most traffic accidents in adults’ eyes. They are not experienced yet, and often fail to pay attention to others on the road. They often think of a car as being some type of toy, but they do not know how powerful it really is. The driver education programs must be strengthened in order to make sure that students really have safer habits, behind the wheel experience, and by having a better understanding of all the laws on the road.
81 Exploring Psychology). Inattentional blindness just goes to show that humans are usually good at focusing, but only on one thing at a time. When you’re so focused on one thing, your mind is completely blind to other events that may be occurring. An example in the article of this is when you’re busy focusing on finding a seat in a movie theater, that you never notice your friends frantically waving their arms around trying to get your attention (Simons, Chabins). By not noticing your friends, you have fallen to the inattentional blindness focus of the experiment. Inattentional blindness is like a horse that has blinders on during a race, it is a sort of tunnel vision of an individual’s
When I was about seven years old, someone pulled right out in front of my parents. We missed hitting them. When I was nine, we almost backed into another car coming down the road. The lady was on her cell phone, not paying any attention to the road. When I was 13, we finally did hit someone. It was my brother’s fault. My brother should have been more focused. These are all things that happen to everyone at one point in their lives. It’s inevitable. I think if people were to pay more attention to the road, crashes would happen less often. Driving can be dangerous, and people can be even more dangerous if not focusing on the task at hand.
This essay is to inform you about certain aspects of driving. In this letter I am going to talk about the effect of response time, a safe following distance, how the stopping distance depends on speed, how to decide what to do at a yellow light and how you have to change your speed around a curve. In the next following paragraphs I will explain each of the topics that I have listed and I will give you a better knowledge of how to be a safer driver.
The main distraction of driving is cell phones. Most adults and teens will engage in texting and driving. Due to the major issue of texting and driving many campaigns have been launched, one being launched by AT&T “when it comes to texting and driving, it can wait.” This campaign has many drivers take the pledge to no longer use their phone when driving, there is an available app that will send out automatic messages to anybody that sends a while the individual is driving. When someone is driving at the rate of 55 miles per hour for only 4.6 seconds, it will equal the length of a football field, 100 yards. So, even stopping full vision from the road for a few seconds will still risk serious danger. Another cause of distracted driving is being exhausted or tired, doing so will cause a much slower reaction time. The slower reaction time causes many of the accidents that happen when people are tired. Another possibility is falling asleep behind the wheel even for a few seconds you could drift, or swerv into another lane and hit another car causing a major or fatal car accident. When taking driving classes, the students within the class will hear the saying “stay alert, stay alive.” The final major distraction of driving is eating and drinking. One of the problems of eating and drinking while driving is that it causes both a visual and manual distraction. When removing your eyes from the road many dangers will be