$2.2 Million NIH Grant Will Extend Distracted Driving Research At UAB

By Katherine Shonesy

The Translational Research for Injury Prevention Laboratory at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has been awarded $2.2 million by the National Institutes of Health to address a major health issue.

Motor vehicle collisions are the leading cause of death among teenagers – inattention is the primary contributor. They account for approximately one in three deaths among teens ages 16 to 19.

With this new influx of funding from the NIH, researchers at UAB will be able to test the influence of age and driving experience on driving attention development under various conditions, and will identify underlying cognitive mechanisms of attention development and ultimately the occurrences of collisions. “We already know that driver inattention equals further vulnerability to distraction,” said Despina Stavrinos, Ph.D., assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychology. “What we need to know more about is the relationship between young age and low driving experience to driving attention. We believe this new study will help reveal how those factors can actually predict driving attention and driving outcomes.”

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