Driving Distracted (circa 2003)

Twenty years ago, a mighty mobile phone near-monopoly, based in Helsinki, was known as Nokia. How Nokia and Kodak both failed to react adaptively to markets they had created is another story. In their heyday -- before 2007 and the advent of  the iPhone -- Nokia sponsored an online magazine called "The Feature." My friends Douglas Rushkoff and David Pescovitz also wrote for it. I had forgotten about it for decades, but I had to dig deep into subfolders of my writing to save something, and I stumbled across a folder full of twenty year old futurism. Here's something about distracted driving, half a decade before the iPhone.

Driving N Dialing

Published in The Feature, early 2000s

By Howard Rheingold

Why do Cell Phone Conversations Interfere with Driving?

http://www.psych.utah.edu/AppliedCognitionLab/TRB1.pdf

Impairments of judgment, perception, and reaction-time caused by driving and dialing are approximately equal to the impairments caused by drinking the legal limit of alcohol; the problem seems to lie not in user interface design but in limitations of human perception and cognition: we can only multitask to a certain degree while hurtling down the highway before we make a bloody mess.

Such are the sobering conclusions of University of Utah psychology researchers David L. Strayer, Frank A. Drews, Dennis J. Croach, and William A. Johnston, whose recent study, "Why Do Cell Phones Conversations Interfere With Driving?" surveys the state of current research and reports on their own team's research findings. Although fumbling with the handset is a hazard, the researchers present evidence that the problem does not seem to be solved by hands-off phones.

While other studies have confirmed that groping for your phone, dialing while driving, and other physical manipulations do have a negative impact on driving, the Utah researchers focused on the effects of telephone conversations. Using driving simulators, undergraduate subjects pursued perceptual and cognitive tasks while using hands-free and hand-held phones, book-on-tape controls, and radio controls. Their data found "no reliable differences between hands-free and hand-held cell phone groups….These data demonstrate that the phone conversation itself resulted in significant slowing in the response to simulated traffic signals, as well as an increase in the likelihood of missing these signals. Moreover, the fact that hand-held and hands-free cell phones resulted in equivalent dual-task deficits indicates that the interference was not due to peripheral factors such as holding the phone while conversing," while "dual-task deficits were not observed in the book-on-tape and radio controls."

People who mess with their sound systems are more likely to miss traffic signals, but nowhere near as likely as people actively engaged in a telephone conversation. And listening to a book or radio broadcast does not impair performance --but a telephone conversation seems to reduce t he driver's capacity to process information about the driving environment in real time.

If further research confirms the Utah psychologists' finding that hands-free telephones are just as distracting as hand-helds, then laws like the ones on the books in France, New York, and New Jersey (and legislation pending in a dozen different states) don't make a lot of sense. Discovering exactly how much impairment of crucial driving skills is caused by telephone conversations, and exactly what kind of impairment, was the objective of the Utah researchers. The driving simulators and sophisticated perceptual and cognitive tests enabled the experiments to probe key questions about these issues. Eye-movement trackers made it possible to calibrate exactly where the test subjects' eyes were looking, while memory tests made it possible to discover how much of what they saw actually registered: "The results indicate that conversing on a cellular phone disrupts the driver's attention to the visual environment. Even when participants looked directly at objects in the driving environment, they were less likely to have explicit memory of those objects if they were conversing on a cell phone. The data are consistent with an inattention-blindness hypothesis whereby the cell phone conversation disrupts performance by diverting attention from the external environment associated with the driving task to an engaging internal context associated with the cell phone conversation." It's not about where you put your hands or your eyes, but about where you put your mind while you are talking on the phone – as opposed to physically manipulating a telephone, radio or book-on-tape control.

Perhaps the most startling of the several experiments conducted by the Utah researchers was a controlled study that compared the performance of drivers who were legally intoxicated with sober drivers who were talking on a cell phone. First, they demonstrated that both intoxicated and phone-using drivers performed less effectively than baseline, and noted that cell-phone-using drivers showed slower reactions, which they compensated for by increasing the distance between them and the car ahead of them; drinking drivers were more aggressive, followed more closely, and braked with greater force. Some of their findings indicate that the cell-phone drivers might actually have more accidents and less responsive driving behavior than intoxicated drivers.

Epidemiological studies have found that cell phone use is associated with a fourfold increase in the likelihood of an accident, and the Utah research provide multiple lines of evidence supporting the hypothesis that telephone conversations impair driver's attentional capabilities more than listening to music or spoken word. How societies decide to deal with the dangers associated with driving and dialing is a political issue, but now it is possible to make policy decisions on the basis of data rather than anecdote – and the latest data seems to "suggest that policies that restrict hand-held devices but permit hands-free devices are not well grounded in science."