August 24, 2008
The Psychology of Driving
By
Graham Hole
Reviewed by Mihaela Chraif
Ejop Editor
Traffic psychology refers to the knowledge one acquires about how to use behavioral principles to modify one's own style of conduct in traffic situations including driving, bicycling, walking, and other forms of locomotion in shared spaces.
There are two perspectives possible and necessary on what people do as drivers: external and internal. The external view on driving includes road conditions and vehicle manipulation; data could be obtainable from instruments, measurements, and observer evaluation. The internal view on driving is the perspective of the drivers themselves: their sensations, perceptions, thoughts, decisions, emotions, and feelings.
Every driver goes through the experience of getting habituated to the driving environment. New drivers have to concentrate hard on their driving. They are tense and often bewildered by the onrush of stimuli in traffic.
The book contents 9 Chapters as follows:
Chapter 1 presents the latest Methodological Issues in the Study of Driving. As the author mentioned in the Preface, the book is not a complete survey of psychological research that is relevant to driving.
Chapter 2 Perceptual Factors in Driving involve: seeing the world around us, anatomical factors involvement (visual acuity in peripheral visual field), using “Top-Down” Processing and retinal adaptation.
Chapter 3 underline that three factors affect the attention: object conspicuity, attention conspicuity and sensory conspicuity.
These are labels that have been used to refer to the capacity of an object to attract attention even though the observer is not specifically looking for it.
Starting from the point that cars are becoming filled with more and more distractions, chapter 4 highlight the Effect of In-Car Distractions on Driving. The mobile phone use while driving is an example of a wider issue that has been analyzed for “at least 50 years”. The author analyzes many studies based on Cognitive Effects of Mobile Phone Use: simulator studies, time reaction measurement and many others.
Chapter 5 reveals the Driving and the Perception of the Risk: “How risky is Driving?”. The strong point of the chapter 5 is the theoretical explanation for risk taking behavior during driving.
Chapter 6 “Driving and Fatigue” highlight the majors’ problems of accidents: “Sleepiness”, “arousal” and “fatigue”.
The alcohol and drugs impairs driving performances. The author underlines that in contrast to most other drugs, statistical analysis show clear that alcohol consumption is associated with greater risk of having an accident.
Nevertheless, the elderly drivers got significantly more influence at risk to an accident.
Vision of driving in the future tends to be the former kind, euphoric focusing on the benefit those technological changes will bring.