Hang Up and Drive

The study was meant to see if both older and younger adults driving performance was affected by talking and holding a conversation on a cell phone. It explored to see how older adults are penalized by the real world dual-task activity, which would be them holding a conversation on a cell phone while driving. They said that the younger adults were more likely to miss traffic signals, signs, and other cars, and have a slower response time when they do see the other cars while using and holding a conversation on a cell phone. Even when the participants would look over in the direction of where the object was, they still didn’t actually see the object because their attention was on the phone conversation that was taking place and towards an internal cognitive context instead of the outside world.

In this experiment they used a car following paradigm where the participants would drive on multiple highways with a single-task, i.e. driving with only and not holding a phone conversation on a cell phone, and then they had the same thing but with a dual-task, i.e. driving while holding a conversation on a cell phone. The participants would follow a pace car that would randomly push on their brakes at random intervals while driving on the highway. They measured a variety of performance variables such as driving speeds, following distance, brake onset time and other variables that have been shown to affect the likelihood or severity of rear end collisions. The experimenters predicted that the variables would be altered given the cognitive basis of distraction associated with talking on a cell phone and holding a conversation on it. Prior research has suggested that both the following distance and brake onset time would be lengthene...

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...where the participant was not using a cell phone, so how can they claim that the collisions were caused because they participants were talking on a cell phone. The participants could have just not have been paying attention to what was going on around them, possible not even really paying attention to the phone conversation, and since the phone conversations were not recorded no one will be able to tell for sure. Not to mention that only four of the dual-task conditioned participants crashed, and again the cell phone conversation cannot be too blamed one-hundred percent based on that two of the single-task conditioned participants crashed as well.

References

Strayer, D. L., & Drews, F. A. (2004). Profiles in Driver Distraction: Effects of Cell Phone Conversations on Younger and Older Drivers. Human Factors, 46(4), 640-649. doi:10.1518/hfes.46.4.640.56806