Predicting older adults' driving difficulties using the Roadwise Review.

The Roadwise Review has been reported to provide an effective means of self-assessing and predicting driving difficulties in older adults. We administered it to 73 community-dwelling older drivers (M = 73 years) and also gathered data on self-reported driving difficulties, 2-year retrospective collisions, and moving violations. The acuity tests and Useful Field of View exhibited substantial ceiling effects that limit predictive utility, and there was a high failure rate on the head and neck flexibility test. Additionally, the Roadwise Review did not predict self-reported driving problems or collision risk. Thus, in current form, it does not appear to be a useful tool for assessing older drivers. Future research efforts should assess predictive validity in a more heterogeneous sample of older adults and with a broader range of outcomes, including on-road driving performance.

Aging and vigilance: who has the inhibition deficit?

The present study compared 18 younger (M = 21.00 years) and 17 older adults (M = 64.29 years) in a modified vigilance task that required the inhibition of a routinized response. The task was a 50-min simulation of industrial inspection, wherein observers were presented with simple displays labeled "good" and "bad" parts. General linear modeling indicated that younger adults showed a doubling of inhibition failures over time (from 19% to 43%); older adults' inhibition failures held constant at approximately 17.5%. In both age groups, those who responded most quickly were also most error-prone. A control experiment, using the traditional vigilance task requiring a response to infrequent "bad" parts, found only small age differences in accuracy and these also favored older adults. This research suggests that younger adults may demonstrate larger inhibition failures when the routinized responses on simple tasks must be suppressed. There are several implications for theory, industrial design, and cognitive assessment.