Cognitive Impairment In Relation to On-Road Driving

• Author / Creator

  Tomczak, Michelle Veronika

• On-road driving is a habitual and automatic task for many Canadians. The commute to work, dropping children off at school, or a simple grocery run require a driver to perform a very
  complex task: driving a vehicle. Driving has become such an automatic behaviour for many that the behaviour itself often goes unnoticed and is even taken for granted. Once the driving performance becomes adversely affected due to aging, vision loss, or illness people tend to lose a sense of freedom and even parts of their identity. Impairment related to on-road driving can come in many different shapes and forms. Driving is a complex cognitive behaviour that is an essential part of everyday life and can be broken down into many subcomponents, each of which can uniquely impact road safety. Cognitive Skills are the core skills used by our brains to think, problem solve, learn, and remember. If a driver is impaired, either due to short-term or long-term cognitive impairment associated with either chronic illness, aging, drug or alcohol consumption, these cognitive skills that are needed for driving are adversely affected - causing impairment and the inability to perform the overall driving behaviour accurately, efficiently and safely. Study 1 of this thesis looked at aging and medication interferences in older drivers as a
  wide range of motor, sensory, and cognitive skills that are imperative for driving are affected in older adults. The application of tablet-based cognitive tasks (TBCT) was used in identifying unsafe drivers in a population of healthy and at-risk for driving older adults. It was hypothesized that older drivers will perform worse on the cognitive tasks and the TBCT will be found predictive for on-road driving performance. Overall, results showed that there was a high accuracy and reliable prediction of unsafe drivers using the TBCT in a sample of older adults. This showed the efficacy of a widely available screening tool that can be applied in other cognitively impaired populations such as drug users. These results lead to the completion of the second study of this thesis. When it comes to driving impairment, drug related cognitive impairment in relation to on-road driving has been increasingly reported during the past decade. The consumption of cannabis and cocaine is associated
  with a range of mental and physical effects that can impair overall driving behaviour. The hypothesis of this study was to identify driving-related cognitive-performance deficits that are
  impacted by recreational drug use, mainly associated with cannabis and cocaine in comparison to healthy controls. Over 300 individuals performed the tablet-based cognitive tasks battery (TBCT) that showed in study 1 to be related to on-road driving performance and are designed to test response speed, memory processes, perceptual-motor skills, and decision making. Data from a control group with healthy non-drug using adults was collected for Study 2 as well. Overall, the drug groups showed deficits in all tasks compared to both control groups. There were significant differences between the cannabis and cocaine groups where cannabis users were faster, and performed
  better on some aspects of the decision-making and perceptual-motor tasks. The results show the unique effects of cannabis and cocaine on human performance relating to driving and
  have important implications for road safety associated with driver impairment and will be investigated in future studies.
  The results of these two studies suggest that there are crucial cognitive performance differences when it comes to different forms of impairment and on-road driving. The results also
  suggest that there might be different blueprints of impairment that can be associated with different drugs, combinations of drugs, medication consumption, or cognitive decline related to aging. Further studies will explore these possibilities and will be addressed in the discussion section of this thesis (Chapter 4).

• Subjects / Keywords

  • cognitive impairment
  • driving
  • aging
  • recreational drug use
  • cognitive assessment

• Graduation date

  Spring 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-5b84-g894

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.