Papantoniou P., Antoniou C., Papadimitriou E., Pavlou D., Yannis G., Golias J., “Is distracted driving performance affected by age? First findings from a driving simulator study”, Proceedings of the International interdisciplinary conference ‘Ageing and Safe Mobility’, Bergisch-Gladbach, November 2014.

The objective of this research is the investigation of the effect of age on distracted driving performance. For this purpose, a driving simulator experiment was carried out at the simulator of the National Technical University of Athens, in which 72 participants from three different age groups were asked to drive under different types of distraction (no distraction, conversation with passenger, mobile phone use) in rural road environment. The data collected from the driving simulator experiment include longitudinal control measures (mean speed, headways), lateral control measures (lateral position) and the reaction time of the driver at unexpected incidents and their analysis showed that distracted driving performance is indeed affected by age. More specifically, participants either talking on the mobile phone or conversing with a passenger were found to drive at lower speeds, with increased headways and with higher reaction times compared to undistracted driving. Furthermore, regarding different age groups, the effect of distracted driving on older drivers is higher than the respective effect in middle aged drivers, while driving distraction has the lowest impact on young drivers.