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Understanding Driving

Applying Cognitive Psychology to a Complex Everyday Task

  • Price: $95.00 $85.50
  • Hardback: 272 pages
  • Published: August 2000
  • ISBN: 978-0-415-18752-7
  • Publisher: Routledge

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Series: Frontiers of Cognitive Science.

This book closely examines what is involved in driving. It identifies the aspects of perception, attention, learning, memory, decision making and action control which are drawn upon in order to enable us to drive, and the brain systems involved. It attempts to show how studying tasks such as driving can help to understand how these fundamental aspects of cognition combine to facilitate performance in complex everyday tasks. In doing so it shows how a very broad range of laboratory based findings can be applied, and that through our attempts to apply this knowledge to complex everyday tasks, we gain, in return, a greater understanding of fundamental aspects of human cognition.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements. Foreword: Drivers and the Driving They Do. Assessing Distance, Speed and Time. Motor Responses and Behavioural Repertoires. Combining Perceptual-motor skills. Attention, Automaticity and Distraction. Learning, Instruction and Training. Memory for Driving. When Driving is Dangerous: Arousal, Assessment, and Hazard Perception. Appraisal, Efficacy and Action. Neurological Damage, Disease and Driving. Towards a Cognitive Account of Driver Behaviour. References.

Reviews

'The book should be of interest to researchers in either traffic-safety or applied cognitive psychology, and it provides an excellent marriage of cognitive and traffic psychology.' - Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books

'Driving is such a pervasive activity and involves such a rich diversity of psychological processes, that this book comes as something of a pleasant surprise. The surprise is that as a thorough analysis of the psychology of driving it is a rare item. The pleasure comes from the success of John Groeger's treatment. The question of why driving has been previously neglected as an activity for serious treatment by psychologists will be left to others, but this book corrects the omission, and in doing so demonstrates in a new domain how both theory and application can benefit when developed in tandem.' - Applied Cognitive Psychology