01/27/03 - Drivers who use a cellular telephone, even with a
"hands-free" device, suffer from a kind of tunnel vision that
endangers themselves and others, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
Legislation that seeks to make mobile telephone use by drivers safer by
mandating the use of a hands-free device may be providing a false sense of
security, they warned.
New York is the only U.S. state that requires the use of the devices for mobile
telephone conversations while driving, but 30 others have been considering
similar laws, as has the Canadian province of Newfoundland.
"Sometimes you have to actually do the silly study that shows the
obvious," David Strayer, an associate professor of psychology at the
University of Utah, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
Driving simulator used
Strayer, whose team has done a series of studies on cell phone use while
driving, set up a driving simulator and put 20 volunteers in it. Sometimes they
used a cell phone and sometimes they did not. Their reaction time, driving style
and performance were monitored.
Writing in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied,
Strayer's group said use of a cell phone clearly distracted the drivers.
The finding adds to a series of similar studies, most notably a 1997 New England
Journal of Medicine report that found talking on a phone while driving
quadrupled the risk of accident.
"People, when on a cell phone compared to when they weren't, overall their
reactions were slower," Strayer said. "They got into more rear-end
collisions. They just kind of had a sluggish style that was unresponsive to
unpredictable events like a car breaking down in front of them, a light changing
and things like that."
There was no difference, Strayer said, between using a hands-free or a hand-held
cell phone.
Impaired either way
"You were impaired in both cases," he said. "That suggests to us
that whatever legislation may be put into place saying you can do one but not
the other ... might send the wrong message and give people a false sense of
security."
Perhaps even more disturbing, Strayer said, was the finding that the volunteers
did not realize they were driving badly.
"We asked people afterward how they felt they performed and they usually
felt they performed without impairment and, in some cases, thought they drove
better when on the cell phones," Strayer said.
"It is like studies that show 90 percent of people think they are
better-than-average drivers. Forty percent of them are wrong."
Strayer wanted to know why talking on a cell phone had such a profound effect on
drivers, so his team set up a second experiment.
"We used an eye tracker a really precise device that allows us to see where
someone is looking," he said.
They found that while the drivers looked at objects, in this case billboards, if
they had been talking on a cell phone at the time they could not remember having
seen them.
"There is a kind of a tunnel vision -- you aren't processing the peripheral
information as well," Strayer said. "Even though your eyes are looking
right at something, when you are on the cell phone, you are not as likely to see
it."
This included road signs, other vehicles and traffic lights. "This is a
variant of something called inattention blindness," Strayer said.
Tests showed this kind of inattention did not affect drivers who were listening
to music, to audio books or talking with a passenger in the car.
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