Brain-training could help young drivers
by Grace Honney
Ever wondered why car insurance companies drop their exorbitant rates from the age of 25?
Obviously younger drivers have far less driving experience and this may attribute to their involvement in more crashes.
However, it could also be to do with the fact that your frontal lobe isn’t fully developed until you’re 25.
The frontal lobe controls things such as hazard detection, risk assessment and the ability to realise the consequences of your actions.
This could be why so many drivers under the age of 25 are involved in crashes.
According to Jacqui Madelin’s article in the AA Directions magazine, Waikato University and the AA Driver Education Foundation have just conducted a study which proved that risk-taking behaviour can be reduced with targeted brain-training.
The training focused on helping teenage drivers to detect and identify hazards – an area in which young people are 30 per cent less capable than older drivers.
Although the results of the study have not yet been fully evaluated, the benefits of targeted training to reduce risk-taking have been so far been correlated.
However, it may be interesting to see if older drivers would also benefit from similar training.
Waikato University would like to hold a larger study at a later date, and as New Zealand has seen another weekend with fatal crashes, studies such as this would definitely be worthwhile.