Centre for Policy on Ageing



Attention and driving performance in Alzheimer's disease
Author(s)	Janet M Duchek, Linda Hunt, Karlene Ball
Journal title	The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological sciences and social sciences, vol 53B, no 2, March 1998
Pages	pp P130-P141
Keywords	Dementia ; Driving capability ; Personality ; United States of America.
Annotation	This study examined the relationship between visual attention measures and driving performance in healthy older adults and individuals with very mild and mild dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Subjects were administered an on-road driving assessment and three visual attention tasks (visual search, visual monitoring, and useful field of view). The results indicated that error rate and reaction time during visual search were the best predictors of driving performance. Furthermore, visual search performance was predictive of driving performance above and beyond simple dementia severity and several traditional psychometric tests. The findings suggest that general cognitive status may be useful for identifying individuals at risk for unsafe driving. However, measures of selective attention may serve to better differentiate safe versus unsafe drivers, especially in the DAT population. (AKM).
Accession Number	CPA-980602407 A
Classmark	EA: OPF: DK: 7T
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.