The role of personality assessment in forensic driving license renewal procedures. A study supported by the MMPI-2 test

The main function of the medical-psychological assessment to evaluate fitness to drive (FTD) is to safeguard the community against risks posed by drivers who, owing to psycho-physical disease, personality disturbances, abuse of psychotropic substances or drugs, can be a hazard to safety on the roads. In the context of psychodiagnostic investigations, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 2 (MMPI-2) test is the gold standard tool supporting clinical assessments conducted to evaluate a subject's capacity to predict her/his own actions, attitudes, risk propensity, level of conformity to social norms. Other important features of the tool include the specific scales aimed at individuating behaviors adopted with the intent to elude or hide existing personality problems. These behaviors are very frequent in the field of medicolegal, psychological and psychiatric assessments, including FTD evaluations. In this study, the MMPI 2 test was administered to 154 subjects for whom Driving Licence (DL) Medical Commissions based in the south of Italy had required specific personality assessments, compared to a control group of 186 subjects with no clinical or psychodiagnostic problems. The question posed in our study was to understand whether the test was able to detect differences between the personalities of the subjects belonging to the two groups. The results obtained demonstrated significant differences between the experimental group and the controls, shown by the MMPI-2 variables, in particular the clinical Hs scale,the supplementary scales: GF, Re, AAS, APS and the content scales DEP and TRT, as well as the PSY-5 Disc and Nege scales.

Cognitive Efficiency and Fitness-to-Drive along the Lifespan: The Mediation Effect of Visuospatial Transformations

The way people represent and transform visuospatial information affects everyday activities including driving behavior. Mental rotation and perspective taking have recently been found to predict cognitive prerequisites for fitness-to-drive (FtD). We argue that the relationship between general cognitive status and FtD is mediated by spatial transformation skills. Here, we investigated the performance in the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) and the Perspective-Taking Test (PT) of 175 male active drivers (aged from 18 to 91 years), by administering the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to measure their global cognitive functioning. All participants were submitted to a computerized driving assessment measuring resilience of attention (DT), reaction speed (RS), motor speed (MS), and perceptual speed (ATAVT). Significant results were found for the effect of global cognitive functioning on perceptual speed through the full mediation of both mental rotation and perspective-taking skills. The indirect effect of global cognitive functioning through mental rotation was only found to significantly predict resilience of attention whereas the indirect effect mediated by perspective taking only was found to significantly predict perceptual speed. Finally, the negative effect of age was found on each driving measure. Results presented here, which are limited to male drivers, suggest that general cognitive efficiency is linked to spatial mental transformation skills and, in turn, to driving-related cognitive tasks, contributing to fitness-to-drive in the lifespan.

The Drives for Driving Simulation: A Scientometric Analysis and a Selective Review of Reviews on Simulated Driving Research

Driving behaviors and fitness to drive have been assessed over time using different tools: standardized neuropsychological, on-road and driving simulation testing. Nowadays, the great variability of topics related to driving simulation has elicited a high number of reviews. The present work aims to perform a scientometric analysis on driving simulation reviews and to propose a selective review of reviews focusing on relevant aspects related to validity and fidelity. A scientometric analysis of driving simulation reviews published from 1988 to 2019 was conducted. Bibliographic data from 298 reviews were extracted from Scopus and WoS. Performance analysis was conducted to investigate most prolific Countries, Journals, Institutes and Authors. A cluster analysis on authors' keywords was performed to identify relevant associations between different research topics. Based on the reviews extracted from cluster analysis, a selective review of reviews was conducted to answer questions regarding validity, fidelity and critical issues. United States and Germany are the first two Countries for number of driving simulation reviews. United States is the leading Country with 5 Institutes in the top-ten. Top Authors wrote from 3 to 7 reviews each and belong to Institutes located in North America and Europe. Cluster analysis identified three clusters and eight keywords. The selective review of reviews showed a substantial agreement for supporting validity of driving simulation with respect to neuropsychological and on-road testing, while for fidelity with respect to real-world driving experience a blurred representation emerged. The most relevant critical issues were the a) lack of a common set of standards, b) phenomenon of simulation sickness, c) need for psychometric properties, lack of studies investigating d) predictive validity with respect to collision rates and e) ecological validity. Driving simulation represents a cross-cutting topic in scientific literature on driving, and there are several evidences for considering it as a valid alternative to neuropsychological and on-road testing. Further research efforts could be aimed at establishing a consensus statement for protocols assessing fitness to drive, in order to (a) use standardized systems, (b) compare systematically driving simulators with regard to their validity and fidelity, and (c) employ shared criteria for conducting studies in a given sub-topic.