Why Older Drivers have Difficulty
It may surprise you to know that older driver's actually see more than younger drivers. And that is why they have difficulty driving.
It turns out that as the brain ages, the visual intake gets bigger. Older brains attempt to take in the background of all motion in their field of vision. This makes the brain's ability to focus on relevant movement, important when reacting to driving movements, more difficult.
In a healthy, young person, a brain region called the middle temporal visual area, or MT, actively suppresses often irrelevant background motion so that he or she can concentrate on t
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he more important motions of smaller objects in the foreground.
But this above average motion perception is not something to look forward to as we age. Because the brain is spending its limited resources constantly paying attention to the unimportant motions of background objects, it has a harder time noticing the motions of smaller objects.
Fellow blogger, Dr. Virginia Campbell, recently posted an interview the authors of "Sleights of Mind:
What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions" by Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, Sandra Blakeslee. This book is the result of the authors' yearlong, world-wide exploration of magic and how its principles apply to our behavior. Magic tricks fool us because humans have hardwired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable—a good magician uses your mind's own intrinsic properties against you in a form of mental jujitsu.
You can read about the findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.
as time to take away her car and driving ability. First off, I bought her the car a few years ago and so she spent her last years driving a new sporty car as opposed to the 20 year old Toyota her late husband left her. And second, I moved her in with me to help make up for the transportation burden. We drive her wherever she needs to go. But a responsible decision needed to be made to get her less than safe driving skills off the road. For her sake, our sake, and most importantly, for the sake of other drivers and passengers including little babies.
METHOD. Data sources were Web of Science, EBSCOhost, PubMed, and recently published literature from experts and team members not yet catalogued in the databases. We used the American Academy of Neurology's classification criteria to extract data from 13 studies, and we assigned a class (I-IV, with I being the highest level of evidence) to each study. We grouped primary studies into categories of driving assessment (neuropsychological; simulator; off-road; self-report, other report, and postinjury disability status; and comprehensive driving evaluation) and synthesized the predictability of these tools as it relates to driving performance for people with TBI.
