The Development of a Cognitive Skills Training to Support Driver Education – Comparing Performance of Experienced and Trained Learner Drivers

Deficits in cognitive skills such as hazard perception are considered one of the major factors explaining the high numbers of crashes for novice drivers. Computer based trainings (CBTs) have been identified as a potential measure to improve such skills. Several CBTs have been developed since. Some of them have been evaluated, however, only by comparing a treatment group and a control group. While results show that the evaluated CBTs are somewhat effective, it is unclear how an experienced driver would have performed in the test scenarios. We developed our own CBT, and in a first step, evaluated it following the same known strategy (treatment and control group, adding a “paper based training group). Results provided evidence for the assumption that the CBT had a positive effect on learner drivers’ glance behaviour in simulated driving (Petzoldt et al., 2013). However, after we confirmed the effectiveness, we tested a group of experienced drivers on exactly the same simulator scenarios. The comparison between treatment, control and experienced driver group is presented in this paper. Results show comparable patterns of glance behaviour for the treatment group and the experienced drivers, superior to that of the control group. Driving performance rated by experts was mostly appropriate for all groups, with notable exceptions for some scenarios