The relevance of situation awareness in older adults’ cognitive functioning: a review

Abstract

Age-related declines in cognition may have detrimental effects on older adults’ ability to complete everyday activities that young- and middle-aged individuals perform automatically. Theories of cognitive aging have found deficits in older adults’ fluid intelligence, capacity for inhibition, number of processing resources, and speed of processing, and in recent years, studies have proposed cognitive strategies to ameliorate these declines. However, few strategies directly train the cognitive strategies necessary to improve performance in dynamic environments and physical activities. One such strategy may be the enhancement of situation awareness, the capability to perceive and understand one’s environment. Although the term has typically been applied to pilots and other expert performers, situation awareness may also be relevant to cognitive aging, where older adults’ perception and comprehension of their environment become critical to everyday functioning and physical activities. If older adults’ situation awareness can be facilitated, then it may be possible to reduce the impact of age-related cognitive declines, allowing older adults to successfully participate in dynamic situations and sports where the environment is constantly changing (e.g., driving and tennis). The following review outlines cognitive deficits in aging, details their relation to situation awareness, and discusses how training in situation awareness may reduce cognitive declines.

The Effect of Active Versus Passive Training Strategies on Improving Older Drivers’ Scanning in Intersections

“…They could fail to respond in time to a developing situation because of declines in psychomotor abilities (Eby, Trombley, Molnar, & Shope, 1998). Or they could fail to properly scan side to side for approaching cross-traffic while navigating a turn because of either changes in physical function (making them unable to turn their head at such extreme angles; McPherson, Michael, Ostrow, & Shaffron, 1988), psychomotor coordination (making them less able to steer as their head is turned; McGill, Yingling, & Peach, 1999), or situation awareness (making them less likely to predict that unseen cross-traffic could round a turn or crest a hill and suddenly encroach during the turn; Caserta & Abrams, 2007). …”

Conocimiento de las normas de tráfico en función de la edad y de la importancia para la seguridad vial

“…Estos resultados pueden ser debidos al deterioro cognitivo producido por la edad, concretamente, al déficit para acceder a la memoria episódica o manejar información en la memoria operativa. Esta desventaja podría incrementarse en escenarios no familiares o ante normativas de tráfico más recientes (Caserta & Abrams, 2007). Sin embargo, es importante destacar que la hipótesis del peor rendimiento de los conductores mayores frente a los más jóvenes solo se confirmó parcialmente, en la categoría de preguntas importantes.…”

“…El deterioro de la memoria no influye tanto si el escenario de conducción es familiar. En cambio, conducir en situaciones donde aparezcan aspectos novedosos de la normativa de tráfico y/o el escenario no sea familiar podría dificultar una conducción segura en los conductores mayores (Caserta & Abrams, 2007).…”

Useful visual field training: A way to improve elderly car drivers’ ability to detect vulnerable road users

“…These age-related differences can be accounted for by measures of contrast sensitivity and useful visual field (Ball & Owsley, 1991;Cross et al, 2009;Horswill et al, 2008;Owsley, 2011). It is also possible that hazard perception ability diminishes in elderly drivers, because they have lower Situation Awareness than younger and middle-age adults (Bolstad, 2001;Caserta & Abrams, 2007). According to Bromberg, elderly drivers drive significantly more slowly than experienced drivers in order to have more time to process information, detect hazards, and respond to them (Bromberg et al, 2012).…”