YOUNG CHILDRENS LEARNING ON ROAD-CROSSING SIMULATIONS

Previous studies have characterised young children as unskilled road-u sers. Provision of training and practice in basic road-crossing skills may reduce children's fisk on the roads, as increasing automatisation of these skills will free attentional resources for more demanding as pects of road-user behaviour. Previous work by Lee and colleagues sugg ests that training on a road-crossing simulation called the Pretend Ro ad improves various aspects of young children's road-crossing skill. T he present investigation extends these findings by reporting on the ge neralisability and durability of these improvements. Five-year-old chi ldren were trained on one of two road-crossing simulations and assesse d on three occasions after training. The results indicate that substan tial transfer occurs between training tasks, but long-term retention a ppears to be weak.