Child vehicular heat stroke deaths

Analysis

Over 25% of parents with children under 3 have lost awareness of the child being present in the car at any point during the drive. Each year, around the world, dozens of children die of vehicle-related hyperthermia. Because these numbers began to rise after the popularization of air bags and rear-facing child safety seats, researchers began to suspect that memory may be the culprit.

According to David M. Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida who has been studying the phenomenon since 2004, the phenomenon is a consequence of tension between the brain's habit-memory and prospective-memory systems, which is resolved when basal ganglia "habit memory" suppresses the "prospective memory" system of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, resulting in a false memory and what he calls "autopilot". Other psychologists have suggested the phenomenon is functionally similar to forgetting keys in a car or forgetting to post a letter.

Diamond has identified common factors of the phenomenon as "stress, sleep deprivation, and change in routine". Stephen Cowen, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, has said that stress can render a person "more attentive to the immediate sensory stimuli or threats in your environment but not as attentive to your more distant memory of leaving your children in the car".