Driving is often considered an important rite of passage. In the United States and Canada, many states and provinces, respectively, allow learners’ permits to be obtained between 15 and 16 years, with an official license possible by age 16. Compared to most other countries worldwide, the minimum requirement for a provisional license is 18 years.

RED LIGHT – STOP!

Interestingly, teens around the globe have been waiting longer to get their licenses. Whether this trend is due to economic fluctuations, increased access to public transportation, ride-sharing services, or the sheer expense of owning, operating, insuring, and parking a vehicle, times have changed.

As a professor at a small liberal arts university in a large city in south-central Texas, I have noticed an increasing number of students who do not have their driver’s license when entering (and even leaving) our university over the last 20+ years. As a university with a large population of first-generation, low-income students, this trend should not have surprised me, and yet it did. As a teenager, getting a driver’s license meant autonomy and the first step toward adulthood.

Yellow Light – Proceed Cautiously

Unexpectedly (although perhaps this was naïve thinking on my part), my own children were a little slow in getting their licenses; perhaps they were content to be chauffeured from activity to activity? While I wanted them to have their licenses so they could drive themselves around and I could have a little less stress in my day, I was also conflicted. Today, there are faster speed limits, more vehicles on the road, more distractions (music stations, cell phones, billboards), more entrance and exit ramps, lights, intersections, pedestrians, bicyclists, runners, animals, construction workers, etc. – a very different environment than when I learned to drive.

Needless to say, the first couple of years of my kids driving were nerve-wracking. My knowledge of brain development, explicit memory, and automaticity kept me on edge while I watched my kids navigate driving. I couldn’t wait for them to acquire enough experience to move some of the more difficult, explicit and conscious tasks to implicit, automatic actions (like which way does the lever go to turn your right indicator on?), and perhaps more importantly, wait for their prefrontal cortex to develop more so risk-taking behavior was more inhibited!

Today, I am less worried (although still concerned) about my kids when they drive as research conducted by a team of researchers located at McMaster University in Canada has shown the presence of an implicit attention bias to possible pedestrian hazards by “expert” drivers (2+ years of licensed driving based on age at study and minimum license age) while driving . . . a simulator (yes, simulators have ecological validity and experimental realism).

Pedestrians Only

Noah Britt, Jackie Chau, and Hong-Jin Sun (pictured below) conducted a series of studies on how licensed drivers allocated their attention to roadside pedestrians while actively driving in a driving simulator. Published in the Psychonomic Society’s Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, these researchers examined the influence of external environmental stimuli on driving behavior.

As Britt said,

“Licensed drivers have an implicit attention bias to roadside pedestrians that appear oriented toward the road. This is likely due to the implicit hazard that a pedestrian facing toward your moving vehicle presents.”

And perhaps more critically, “this [finding was present] across three different experiments with multiple control conditions, and [the researchers] found that this attentional bias toward inward-facing pedestrians was SPECIFIC to only when actively driving, and not when stationary or with inanimate roadside stimuli (i.e., a light-post).”

The image below illustrates what drivers of the simulator saw under each condition across the three experiments. Panel A displays a red precursor cue intended to activate the driver’s peripheral vision and indicate the location of a virtual pedestrian. Once the virtual pedestrian appeared, the driver had to use an up or down arrow to indicate the arm position or the light post as long as it was in a valid position (see the examples in panel B). As Panel B also shows, the pedestrian could be facing the street or facing away from it.

The results of their three experiments show that

“Drivers are well-equipped to perceive hazards that appear while driving. [And] . . .drivers are successful in better detecting roadside pedestrians that appear facing toward the road compared to facing away from the road, even when that is not relevant to the task they are performing.”

These findings are clearly shown in the figure below. Panel A summarizes the results of the reaction time of participants across the three experiments and the different experimental and control conditions. Shorter bars mean faster responses; red bars mean the pedestrian was facing toward the road; no diagonal bars were valid trials in which the precursor cue matched the side the pedestrian was on.

Panel B shows a different dependent variable in which the difference between reaction time on validly cued trials was subtracted from reaction time on invalidly cued tries. Positive values indicated a facilitation effect, such as seen in the red bars of the experimental condition for each experiment. In real-world terms, participants responded faster to pedestrians who faced toward the road than those who faced away from the road, and all control conditions.

Green Light – It’s a GO!

Overall, Britt indicated that “This [series of studies] revealed the context-specific nature of the attention bias to roadside stimuli that convey an implied probability of a potential hazard.”

But more importantly from this parent’s perspective, this finding “implies drivers are efficient at attending to roadside hazards as a result of previous driving experience.” Thus, a task that was initially composed of many new mini-processes and required significant attention resources has been converted to a much smaller series of tasks, with many of the initial processes automated or subject to implicit biases and memory.

As stated by the authors,

“The present research highlights how our attention can be influenced by familiar real-world contexts. Drivers strategically allocated greater attention to roadside pedestrians facing toward the road, but only when actively driving. These insights are crucial for understanding how drivers perceive and respond to stimuli in their environment, which can inform driver training programs and the design of safer road systems.”

Featured Psychonomic Society post

Britt, N., Chau, J., & Sun, H. J. (2025). Context-dependent modulation of spatial attention: prioritizing behaviourally relevant stimuli. Cognitive Research: Principles & Implications, 10, 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-025-00612-x