It has been discovered that apparently, speedo focusing is bad. In a new study involving 84 participants, researchers at the University of Western Australia have found that whenever participants in the driving simulator were told they would be fined for going over the speed limit by 1km, 6km or 11kms per hour, they were less likely to be aware of hazards on the road.
Basically, people within the study who concentrated too hard on not speeding found it more demanding and exhausting to focus on not going over. Therefore, this could mean that although people want to put in stricter penalties on speeding, this could take away drivers’ concentration on important things, like hazards on the road.
Lead researcher Dr Vanessa Bowden said:
“You can’t necessarily make drivers pay more attention to the speed and go more slowly without taking their attention away from some other critical aspect of driving”.
The researchers tested the participants’ response rate by measuring their response time to small red dots in their peripheral vision. They also asked participants to fill out a questionnaire on how they found their experience, discovering that people who had the 1km leeway of speeding found the task much more difficult to maintain than those who had the leeway of 6km.
There’s also a leeway that you can legally drive over in Western Australia, but police didn’t want to tell people just how much leeway there is.