Abstract
A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that quality of individual driving skills is related to certain self-perceptual characteristics of the individual as well as to field dependence/independence and susceptibility to basic geometric illusions. 117 undergraduate males and females responded to a 17-item driving skills questionnaire (BDS) and a 20-item biographical inventory (BBI). All subjects were also tested on the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) in addition to a five item paired-comparison test of the Muller-Lyer (arrowhead) geometric illusion (MLT).
Subjects were categorized on the basis of driving skills scores and these scores were then related to the separate items of the BBI and the individual scores of the GEFT and MLT.
The results indicated that one third of the respondents scored, by their own evaluations, as relatively poor drivers and that this group differed significantly from the larger group of relatively good drivers in terms of all three dependent measures. To a significant degree, the poor drivers tended to see themselves as generally less constrained by conventionality in several areas (i.e., parental influence, organizational ambition, and verbal behavior). They also displayed a significantly greater degree of field independence than did the good drivers, and much less susceptibility to geometric illusion effects. Of the two latter measures, the illusions appeared to be the more powerful discriminator among drivers, although as expected, they are strongly negatively correlated (r = − .80).
The results suggest that it is possible to identify driving skills by means of simple test instruments requiring not more than a few minutes to administer, and with significant reliability. Such information could be very useful in driver training contexts as a pre-training screening device for use in tailoring programs to individual student needs.
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