KEY POINTS:
Ground-breaking research on teenage drivers has "huge" implications for their training and licensing, says a trustee of the AA Driver Education Foundation.
Peter Sheppard says teenage drivers should be required to spend longer under supervision before being allowed to drive alone.
This follows research by psychologists at Waikato University into overseas findings that teenagers' brains are not sufficiently developed to adequately assess and respond to risk.
Their tests on young New Zealand drivers matched the overseas studies.
But the university and AA Driver Education say they have trained teenage drivers in higher cognitive skills such as visual search, hazard detection and risk management.
Mr Shepherd said the university findings showed changes were needed in driver training.
"What we really need to do is bring forward hazard identification and other higher-order skills.
"We need to push out the period of supervised driving before they go solo. Best practice around the world suggests 120 hours as a minimum."
More supervised training should be carried out in the early stages, and the first driving test before being allowed to go solo should be a lot tougher and should take account of the higher-order skills.
Even if the legal age for obtaining a driving licence was not changed, requiring teenagers to gain more experience would raise the age at which they began driving alone.
Mr Sheppard said there were advantages to the present young age, in that cognitive training could be incorporated in school-based driver training, in which courses earn National Certificate of Educational Achievement credits.
Young drivers who go through the graduated driving system were mostly intent on simply getting a licence.
"At the moment, the emphasis is on learning the road rules and being able to move the vehicle safely," Mr Sheppard said.
In his opinion, more help needed to be provided to parents of teenage drivers to show them what was needed to help cope with many different pressures, including peer pressure.
He was running a pilot scheme for "parents as driving coaches".
The psychological experiment on teenagers was conducted by Waikato University psychology lecturer Robert Isler.
He has previously said a driving age of 15 is out of line with other countries, where teenagers usually have to wait until they are 17 or 18 to drive solo.
"Frontal lobe training is vital if young people are to appropriately apply the practical skills they've learned," said Dr Isler.
"This study could revolutionise driver training, not just in New Zealand, but internationally."
Dr Isler said the experiment on teenagers had shown big changes could be needed in the way young drivers were taught and licensed.
"What we found is that the beneficial effects on driving of such cognitive skills training are so great that we know we can improve the safety of young drivers without even putting them behind the wheel," he said.
Training in higher-level driving skills could improve teenagers' risk management skills so that they see hazards earlier while driving.
"No-one has done anything like this before, that's why it's such a huge breakthrough for driver training with enormous implications on the way to best train young drivers," he said.
Dr Isler said young people's inability to assess and respond to risk was directly connected to brain maturity.
"The brain's frontal lobe is responsible for cognitive functions that control life-saving behaviour such as emotion regulation, hazard anticipation and risk management," he said. "Yet brain imaging studies show this lobe does not fully develop until drivers are 25."
It did not take long for a young driver to learn the practical skills of driving - which might lead to over-confidence.
"It normally takes much longer to learn related cognitive skills, like hazard perception, risk management and self control."
The AA Driver Education Foundation and Waikato University carried out the "double-blind frontal lobe project" at Taupo last September, with 72 participants.
- NZPA
Young drivers
* Drivers aged 15 to 24 make up 16 per cent of all drivers, but are responsible for about 38 per cent of crashes.
* Teenage drivers are 19 times more likely to crash in their first six months driving solo than in the months in which they were supervised.
* Drivers aged under 25 account for 30 per cent of road deaths and injuries.
