Forgetting near-accidents: the roles of severity, culpability and experience in the poor recall of dangerous driving situations

Abstract

It is often assumed that real‐life events such as minor road accidents and near accidents will be well remembered. However, surveys of self‐reported accidents suggest that respondents apparently forget approximately one third of their road accidents each year. This paper explores this possibility by looking at memory for the near‐accidents in which drivers are involved. In a pilot study drivers carried microcassette recorders in their cars and reported near‐accidents after each journey. These data confirmed that the frequency of near‐accidents is greatly underestimated when subjects are simply asked to recall them. The main study then compared reports and recalls of over 7000 car journeys from 80 subjects over the course of a year. These included more than 400 reports or recalls of near‐accidents. The influences of the driver's experience, the severity of the near‐accident, and the driver's self‐perceived degree of blame were additionally explored. It is concluded that near‐accidents are generally forgotten extremely rapidly, with an estimated 80% of incidents being no longer reported after a delay of up to two weeks. Serious near‐accidents and those where the driver admitted being to blame in the incident were least likely to be forgotten. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Are young drivers as careful as they deem? In vehicle data recorders and self reports evaluations

“…The accuracy of self-reported near-crashes, which are much more common, is even more doubtful than that of self-reported crashes. Chapman and Underwood [6] found that 80 % of near-crashes were forgotten after two weeks.…”

Attending to the peripheral world while driving

“…In assessment of on-road accident liability, such events would be called near-accidents, and defined as incidents where the driver retrospectively considered there to be a possibility of an accident causing damage or injury. In a recent study on memory for near-accidents, Chapman and Underwood (2000) found that 43 participants reported 382 near-accidents across 3592 journeys (recorded on dictaphones after each journey). On this basis the number of experiences similar to the type of events portrayed in the clips will be considerably higher for any individual than the actual number of accidents they have had, and therefore the rise in exposure to such events with increasing driving experience should be more marked.…”

Wakeful rest alleviates interference-based forgetting

“…For instance, there are plentiful cases of convictions arising from mistaken eyewitness identification (e.g. Pezdek, 2012), indicating a failure of memory, and events such as nearaccidents on the road appear to be forgotten with alarming speed (Chapman & Underwood, 2000). Understanding the processes surrounding memory distortion is therefore extremely important and, unsurprisingly, there is a long history of research examining forgetting within experimental psychology (e.g.…”