Dri­ving as Next Brain Fit­ness Application? 

Last month, at the MIT/ Smart­Sil­vers event where we pre­sented our Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket Report, we dis­cussed what spe­cific appli­ca­tions, beyond the cur­rent empha­sis on healthy aging, might take com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing to a new level.  

Assess­ing and improv­ing dri­ving skills would be a top can­di­date, given both the well-defined nature of the need and the appear­ance of pro­grams with grow­ing evi­dence (both sci­en­tific and real-world) behind.

The New York Times Asks… 

Along these lines, the New York Times just published this arti­cle: Are You a Good Dri­ver? Here’s How to Find Out. A few quotes:

- “COULD a video game make you a bet­ter dri­ver? More impor­tant, could com­puter soft­ware pre­vent teenagers from mak­ing fatal mis­takes or even weed out older dri­vers whose debil­i­ties make them crash-prone?”

- “There are already pro­grams like AAA’s Road­wise Review (about $15), which is intended to help older peo­ple eval­u­ate their driving.”

- “There are other pro­grams that will test men­tal agility and then use sub­se­quent com­puter train­ing ses­sions to improve a driver’s skills. One such pro­gram is an online appli­ca­tion called Dri­ve­Fit ($89), which was devel­oped by Cog­niFit, an Israeli com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in cog­ni­tive train­ing soft­ware. Dri­ve­Fit uses visual and mem­ory tests to mea­sure 12 driving-related cog­ni­tive abilities.”

What are we talk­ing about 

You may be won­der­ing, “What do these train­ing ses­sions look like?”. Well, if you have a few min­utes to spare, why don’t you try these exer­cises that come from Mind­Fit (sim­i­lar premise to Dri­ve­Fit, devel­oped by Cog­niFit too).

 

The “Inside and Out­side” task was designed to train divided atten­tion skills. Divided atten­tion is the abil­ity to pay atten­tion to more than one thing at a time.

 

 

The “Two in One” task was designed to train one’s abil­ity to per­form two tasks simultaneously.

 

 

Another ques­tion we often get when talk­ing with insur­ance com­pa­nies, “So, can we really train dri­vers to act smarter behind the wheel”? Well, it depends of what “smarter” means (we are not aware of brain train­ing pro­grams to make dri­vers avoid alco­hol, or sleep-inducing medica­ments, before dri­ving), but there is grow­ing evi­dence that spe­cific cog­ni­tive skills that are impor­tant for dri­ving can, indeed, be trained, result­ing in bet­ter dri­ving outcomes.

Researchers weigh in 

A key research ref­er­ence: the pub­lished stud­ies by Dr. Kar­lene Ball and Dr. Jerri Edwards. We had the for­tune to inter­view Dr. Edwards recently, and this is what she had to say when I asked her to explain the results of their 2003 Human Fac­tors paper (Roenker, D., Cis­sell, G., Ball, K., Wadley, V., & Edwards, J. (2003). Speed of pro­cess­ing and dri­ving sim­u­la­tor train­ing result in improved dri­ving per­for­mance. Human Fac­tors, 45: 218–233):

“Our goal was to train what is called the “use­ful field of view.” The use­ful field of view is a mea­sure of pro­cess­ing speed and visual atten­tion that is crit­i­cal for dri­ving per­for­mance, and one of the areas that declines with age. It has pre­vi­ously been shown that this skill can be improved with train­ing, so we wanted to see what effect it would have on the dri­ving per­for­mance of older adults, and whether the train­ing would be more or less effec­tive than a tra­di­tional dri­ving sim­u­la­tion course.

For the study, we divided forty-eight adults over fifty-five years old into two inter­ven­tion groups of twenty-four peo­ple each. Each group received twenty hours of train­ing. One group was exposed to a tra­di­tional dri­ving sim­u­la­tor, where they learned spe­cific dri­ving behav­iours. The other one went through the cog­ni­tive train­ing program.

Both groups’ dri­ving per­for­mance improved right after their respec­tive pro­grams, but most ben­e­fits of the dri­ving sim­u­la­tor dis­ap­peared by month eighteen.

The speed-of-processing inter­ven­tion helped par­tic­i­pants not only improve “use­ful field of view,” the skill that was directly trained, but it also trans­ferred into real-life dri­ving, and the results were sus­tained after 18 months. And, by the way, the eval­u­a­tion was as real as one can imag­ine: a 14-mile open road evaluation.

Faster speed-of-processing seemed to enable adults to react bet­ter to unex­pected events that require a fast response and to reduce by 40% the num­ber of dan­ger­ous manoeu­vres on real roads (defined as those that required the train­ing instruc­tor to inter­vene dur­ing the evaluation).”

You can read the whole inter­view by click­ing on Improv­ing Dri­ving Skills and Brain Func­tion­ing– Inter­view with ACTIVE’s Jerri Edwards.

Note: the pro­gram used in that study, called Visual Aware­ness, was recently acquired by Posit Sci­ence Corporation.

In sum­mary

In short, more likely than not, I’d reply YES to the ques­tion used to open the New York Times arti­cle. A well-designed video game CAN make one a bet­ter driver.

Of course, this is an emerg­ing field, and much more research needs to be done before appli­ca­tions become main­stream, but the field cer­tainly deserves more atten­tion, research dol­lars, and engage­ment by insur­ance com­pa­nies to design and con­duct real-world trials.

All­state: what about spend­ing just a frac­tion of your scary ad cam­paign ad cam­paign bud­get in explor­ing addi­tional poten­tial solutions?

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