“The Psychology of learning to drive”

By George Wyatt (A-Level Psychology Student)

August 2025

#005

My name is George Wyatt (son of Dean!) and I am currently an A-Level student studying Psychology, with the view of going to university to learn one of the many different specific types of psychology for a degree qualification.

I learnt to drive a few months ago and thought people may find my experience interesting and useful, of how linked I found driving and psychology to be. If you would like further information, please get in touch via Dean Wyatt Driving School...

“The Psychology of learning to drive”

Learning to drive is an exceptionally mentally challenging task. It is a long process which will undoubtedly involve many ups and downs. In this blog I will explain how multiple different aspects of psychology play important roles in the process of learning a new task, in particular driving.  

Your first driving lesson is both an exciting but also scary experience. You are given full control of a machine capable of going up to 100mph. This knowledge in itself can make getting over the first few hurdles even more difficult. This is because it can cause you to enter ‘fight or flight’ mode. Being in this state will ultimately cause a significant increase in adrenaline being secreted from the adrenal medulla. Having more adrenaline in your bloodstream causes many physiological changes in your body, such as rapid breathing, sweating or faster heart rate. This is completely natural and would be a benefit in more life-threatening situations. However, these are not ideal when trying to drive a car for the first time. My recommendation to overcome this is to be honest with yourself and your instructor. If you feel that you are not in an adequate state of control, let your instructor know and appropriate measures can be taken to make you feel more comfortable. One way in which you could avoid this is by practicing proper calming techniques. These could include muscle tensing or special breathing techniques. This works on the assumption of reciprocal inhibition. This is the idea that 2 opposing emotions cannot exist simultaneously. This can be applied to driving by replacing the feeling of fear and anxiety on the first few lessons, with being calm through the use of the techniques previously mentioned. This will give you an advantage in your first few lessons and allow you to progress as fast as possible, while also staying completely safe. 

From my personal experience, something that was quite frustrating in the early stages of learning was seeing how simple everything looked when my instructor did it, but when I tried it, it went wrong! This can be explained by using ‘Fitts and Posners’ theory which says when learning any new skill there are 3 stages:

You start in the ‘Cognitive Stage’. In this stage, all behaviour requires intense conscious thought and working memory is heavily involved. This means that all your attention must be focussed on the task - for example, when to change gear and maintaining lane discipline. This can be linked with ‘Baddleys‘ working memory model in which he proposed that you carrying out 2 or more behaviours that use the same sub store (‘Visuospatial Sketchpad’ and ‘Phonological Loop’) will interfere with one another. For example, when you first start driving and are asked to turn right at the end of the road, you are likely also rehearsing in your head the procedure for turning right. This can cause interference and mistakes, such as forgetting to signal or put the clutch down when slowing down. However, for your instructor, the procedure will be autonomous for them - this means that their phonological loop will not be overloaded, allowing them to carry out the task smoothly with less mistakes.  

The second stage in ‘Fitts and Posners’ theory is the ‘Associative Stage’. At this point you will have started to link different cues with one another. For example, you now know that hearing too many revs means you should change gear. This influences your behaviour and allows you to continue improving. We can apply the behaviourist approach to this, in particular ‘Skinners’ theory of ‘Operate Conditioning’. Skinner was a famous behaviourist psychologist who came up with the theory of negative reinforcement through his experiment on rats. He found that when we do something that can remove a negative stimulus, we are more likely to continue doing that. So when applied to learning to drive, stalling can be the negative stimulus that we want to remove. When you put the clutch down in time or change gear, you remove this negative stimulus from your lesson. This makes you feel good and means that you're more likely to keep on doing this in future lessons - an association has been formed and you are now significantly less likely to stall, thus improving your driving capabilities. 

The last stage in ‘Fitts and Posners’ theory is the ‘Autonomous Stage’. In this stage the behaviour becomes automatic and requires very little cognitive workload. This is likely to be the stage that your driving instructor will be in currently, and this explains why everything looks so much easier for them. We can link this to one of ‘Tulvings’ types of long term memory (LTM) - in particular ‘Procedural’ memory. This is involved in learning skills and does not require conscious thought, unlike ‘Somatic’ and ‘Episodic’ memory. This usually includes a regular simple task - like walking or riding a bike - and is located in the ‘Basal Ganglia’ and ‘Cerebellum’ in your brain. It is important to realise that even after you pass your driving test, you will not yet have reached this level of skill. This means that it is essential for your safety that even after you pass, you are still putting as much attention and effort into driving as when you were learning. I experienced this first hand when I drove alone for the first time - I found it just as hard, and passing my test did not make driving an autonomous skill instantly. 

In conclusion, learning to drive is a demanding journey yet also a rewarding one. It involves lots of both cognitive and physical effort and multiple psychological approaches can be applied to explain and aid the process (we have spoken about a few of these, such as the ‘Behaviourist’ approach), however, other approaches such as the ‘Cognitive’ approach and ‘Schema’ theory also play an important role. Therefore, if you are looking for more information, researching that could be a good start.

Thank you for reading,

George Wyatt