More than a decade ago, the National Institutes of Health sent researchers to high schools across suburban Washington to track teens with lasers and video cameras.
They wanted to see how their young subjects drove when they had passengers with them.
So the researchers stood outside 10 parking lots in Maryland and Virginia. The teens had no idea they were being watched as researchers jotted down details about who was riding in the cars and then monitored the subjects as some sped and tailgated away from campus.
Now, expanding on that work, scientists are using driving simulations and brain scans to try to explain not just how young people drive when they’re with others, but why.
“We don’t want teenagers just staying at home. We want people to go out and explore and figure out who they are,” said Emily Falk, who as director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania has been putting teen drivers in MRIs to probe their minds.
But the cognitive upsides of youth can also be a vulnerability. As teens, “we’re really sensitive to the social environment, and that’s mostly a good thing,” Falk said. But “this kind of sensitivity to the social environment can lead to risk-taking.”
Despite decades of progress, traffic accidents remain the No. 1 cause of death for young people, killing 2,600 teens in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although fatalities in crashes involving young drivers fell by nearly half from 2005 to 2014, federal safety officials on Friday said that figure jumped 10 percent in 2015, helping spur a sharp increase in traffic deaths overall.
On the Tuesday before graduation last month in Montgomery County, one of the original counties studied by the NIH back in 2004, three teammates on the Clarksburg High School football team were killed when their Ford F-250 drove off a dark, curving road and into a tree.
“The risk of a crash is higher when there are teen passengers in the car,” said Ruth Shults, a CDC epidemiologist and teen-driving expert. “The risk is there, but it’s not there all the time.”
Generally, teen passengers are not a distraction, Shults said, so it’s important “we don’t get the idea that, ‘Oh my gosh, every time we put two kids together it’s going to be disaster.’ ”
Problems arise when risks are layered atop one another, like driving with passengers and at night, a combination that can be treacherous for inexperienced drivers, she said.
Success in reducing teen deaths has largely come from paring back opportunities for disaster. Safer cars, plus the widespread adoption of graduated driver-licensing programs, which can delay driving with and without passengers and impose some restrictions on nighttime travel, have made a big difference. Tightening those standards in states with looser rules would save many lives, experts said.
Getting a closer look inside teen cars and brains can also hone prevention efforts, according to researchers.
The NIH snooping outside the Montgomery and Fairfax County high schools netted intriguing results and marked the beginning of a snowballing research effort. The tracking was legal, but researchers got permission from principals anyway.
Read more of the original article in The Washington Post.
