Novice drivers (16-year-olds with ≤6 months' driving experience) have the highest crash involvement rates per 100 million vehicle miles (161 million vehicle km). In the past, this was attributed to greater risk taking or poorly developed psychomotor skills. More recently, however, their high crash involvement rate has been hypothesized to be attributable largely to their relative inability to acquire and assess information in inherently risky situations. The current study seeks to evaluate this hypothesis by recording eye movements while 72 participants (24 novice drivers, 24 younger drivers, and 24 older drivers) drove through 16 risky scenarios in an advanced driving simulator. There were significant age-related differences in driver scanning behavior, consistent with the hypothesis that novice drivers' scanning patterns reflect their failure to acquire information about potential risks and their consequent failure to deal with these risks. Actual or potential applications of this research include modification of these scenarios for display on a PC as a basis for a training module that would enable novice drivers to recognize risky scenarios before they encounter them on the road, in the hope of reducing their high fatality rate.

Sixteen year old drivers are involved in 10.3 fatal crashes per 100 million vehicle miles, a rate almost double that of 18 year olds and almost eight times that of 45–64 year olds, who are the safest group of drivers. Crash rates are particularly higher during the first month of licensure and decline rapidly for about six months and 1000 miles and then much more slowly for at least two years, consistent with a typical learning curve. Research indicates that drivers who have their learner’s permit or are just newly licensed have particular difficulties identifying areas of a scenario from which hidden risks could emerge. Standard driver education programs do not appear to address these difficulties adequately. This suggests that some alternative form of driver training could reduce the crashes, either in the classroom or on the road. A PC based program designed to teach drivers to recognize risks early on is shown to improve their awareness of hazards, both on an advanced driving simulator and on the road.

Younger drivers (18–21 years) are over-involved in crashes. Research suggests that one of the reasons for this over-involvement is their failure to scan areas of the roadway for information about potential risks in situations that are hazardous, but not obviously so. The primary objective of the present study is to develop and evaluate a training program that addresses this failure. It was hypothesised that PC-based hazard anticipation training would increase the likelihood that younger drivers would scan for potential hazards on the open road. In order to test this hypothesis, 12 trained and 12 untrained drivers' eye movements were measured as they drove a vehicle on local residential, feeder and arterial roads. Overall, the trained drivers were significantly more likely to gaze at areas of the roadway that contained information relevant to the reduction of risks (64.4%) than were the untrained drivers (37.4%). Significant training effects were observed even in situations on the road that were quite different from those shown in training. These findings have clear implications for the type of training of teen drivers that is necessary in order to increase their anticipation of hazards.