Elderly dri­vers are the most dan­ger­ous on the road, we are often led to believe thanks to the news high­light­ing acci­dents involv­ing the aged.

This is not nec­es­sar­ily the case, research is show­ing, but it’s partly true due to the decline of many cog­ni­tive func­tions. In a com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle look­ing at the neu­ro­science of dri­ving, Drake Ben­nett looks at what safe­guards can be put in place to pre­vent unsuit­able dri­vers from tak­ing to the road and why elderly dri­vers aren’t inher­ently bad.

“[Study­ing dri­ving] turns out to be an excel­lent way to look at the lim­its of our atten­tional abil­i­ties, espe­cially as we get older and we start to show sig­nif­i­cant declines,” says David Strayer, a psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Utah. “It’s one of the most direct ways to be able to look at how atten­tion works, how multi-tasking works.” […]

There is such a thing as too much cau­tion, of course: dri­ving too slowly on a high­way can be as dan­ger­ous as dri­ving too fast. But accord­ing to the researchers who study them, the wis­dom of the elderly dri­ver con­sists in treat­ing dri­ving as some­thing dan­ger­ous — which, no mat­ter how sharp our skills, it is.

via Mind Hacks