Can older pedestrians be trained to make safer street-crossing decisions?
CAVALLO ; DOMMES
Type de document
COMMUNICATION ORALE SANS ACTES (COM)
Langue
anglais
Auteur
CAVALLO ; DOMMES
Résumé / Abstract
As attested by accident statistics, road crossing is a highly difficult task for older pedestrians. In a series of experiments in a street-crossing simulator we have observed that the high speed of approaching cars and traffic complexity (two-way streets) are critical external factors that cause older pedestrian to make risky street-crossing decisions. With regard to internal factors, we have shown that functional declines contribute to increase the risk of collisions: processing speed and visual attention abilities (measured by UFOV) were found to play the most important role in predicting risky street-crossing decisions, together with time-to-arrival estimation, walking speed and executive functions. In two experiments we studied the possibility of training older pedestrians to make safer decisions in simulated street-crossing situations. The first study focused on one-way traffic conditions and used a combined educational and behavioural (on a street-crossing simulator) intervention program. This kind of training proved effective in improving the overall street-crossing safety of older pedestrians in by shifting the decision criterion towards more conservative judgments. However, the ability to take the oncoming car's speed into account did not improve. The second study tested the effectiveness of three intervention programs in two-way traffic situations : cognitif (UFOV-training), behavioural (simulator-training) and educational (class-room training). None of the three training programs proved to be effective in improving the older pedestrians' safety. These findings are discussed in relation to the importance of combining different training components. They also raise questions concerning the limits of training programs for improving older pedestrians' safety in situations where perceptual skills are predominant.
