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You "walk the line" during a sobriety test because you shouldn't drive if you can't walk. But as this ScienCentral News video explains, newly published research suggests that driving may be just as dangerous if you plan to talk.
Dialing and Driving
A study published today is providing the first peer-reviewed scientific evidence that driving and talking on a cell phone could be just as bad as drinking and driving.
"If you do a carefully controlled study where you equate for the amount of time that people are driving and the driving conditions, you're actually worse off when you are using a cell phone than when you're legally drunk," says David Strayer, a psychologist at the University of Utah. Strayer had done several previous studies showing that talking on a cell phone significantly impaired driving, so he wanted to know how talking compared to the ultimate driving impairment.
"So we had people come in one day and we got them legally drunk, with a blood alcohol level of .08," says Strayer. "And then we measured how they drive in our driving simulator."
The simulator is a $100,000 virtual reality driving machine in which volunteers follow a pace car. The simulator measures how fast, accurately and aggressively the driver follows the route. At the same time an eye tracking device measures where the driver is looking the whole time. Forty volunteers drove the car on four different mornings: once while legally intoxicated, once while talking on a hands-free cell phone, once while talking on a hand-held cell phone, and once with no distractions.
As Strayer and his colleagues wrote in the journal Human Factors, drunk drivers were more aggressive, tailgated more, and hit the brake pedal harder. Cell phone drivers took longer to hit the brakes, and got in more accidents. (There was no difference between hands-free and hand-held cell phone drivers.) Strayer notes that these are different results, but both are dangerous, and "in both cases you were significantly impaired."
Strayer had announced some preliminary data from his study at a scientific meeting in 2003. It took until now for the study to be completed, undergo review by other researchers and finally be published. This work builds on previous research of his which showed that talking on a "hands-free" cell phone impairs driving just as much as when the phone is in your hand.
The researchers think talking on a cell phone is so distracting (more distracting than talking to a fellow passenger) because of a phenomenon they call "inattention blindness," where the drivers enter a kind of "virtual reality" with the person they're chatting with. "Neither you nor the other person is really dealing with the physical environment that you're in," says Strayer. "Instead you're in this kind of cell phone-induced virtual reality, and you interact in that virtual environment rather than talk about the physical here and now of driving." He adds, "Even though the driver who is using the cell phone is looking out the windshield, they're not necessarily seeing what's out there because their mind is directed elsewhere." The eyetracking part of his studies confirm this: The drivers who talked on phones remembered half as many of the objects they looked at compared to those who were driving without talking on phones.
On top of that, the drivers did not even realize that they weren't really "seeing" everything in front of them on the road. They thought they were driving perfectly safely, and figured that if anyone had a problem driving while using a cell phone, it would be "the other guy." He explains, "Part of this inattention blindness shuts down their own processing and their own assessment of how well they're driving. So they themselves are not as aware of their driving performance while they're using a cell phone."
Inattention blindness from cell phones is the beginning of what Strayer calls a "new class of distractions" for our modern multitasking culture. "You now have navigation systems, electronic mail, you can send and receive faxes, you can surf the Internet while you're driving. There's all of a sudden a new class of technology that's making its way into the vehicle that has a much greater potential for distraction."
All that said, Strayer and his colleagues do not want to trivialize the dangers of driving drunk. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the drivers in the majority of fatal DWI accidents are, on average, twice as intoxicated as Strayer's volunteers, based on their blood-alcohol level. And Strayer points out that while most of those fatal accidents happen late at night, when drivers are also fatigued, his simulations happened in the morning after participants supposedly had a night of sleep.
Still, he hopes his work has a sobering influence that prevents people from dialing and driving.
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