“This visual imagery competes for processing resources with what the driver sees in front of them on the road”, Hole said in a university news release.
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“The only “safe” phone in a auto is one that’s switched off”, he concluded.
Dr. Hole added that the findings have implications for real-life mobile phone conversations. The person at the other end of the phone might ask ‘where did you leave the blue file?’ – causing the driver to mentally search a remembered room.
It has been assumed driving while speaking on a hand-held phone is distracting because it is being held and interferes with the driver’s ability to control the vehicle. “But a mounting body of research is showing that both hand-held and hands-free phones are dangerously distracting”.
A study by clever people at a university has found that hands-free phones are just as distracting to use when driving as the normal types of phones you hold in your actual hand, thanks to the way the brain pauses thinking about driving to answer boring questions about whether beans or peas should accompany tonight’s dinner. In other words, the eye-tracking data showed that the participants looked at the hazards but did not react to them. Undistracted participants’ eye movements ranged over a much wider area.
The Sussex psychologists ran two experiments in which participants performed a video-based hazard-detection task. The first one had participants either undistracted or distracted by listening to sentences and deciding whether they were true or false.
The researchers found that the drivers in the second group had slower reaction times to road hazards, and were more likely to “look but fail to see” hazards. These impairments were worse for the participants who were distracted by imagery-inducing statements, the release noted.
“There’s a difference between looking at where you’re going and actually seeing what is out there and where you’re brain starts fill in these blanks, but it’s filling in blanks without having all the information”, she says.
It is illegal in the United Kingdom to ride a motorcycle or drive using hand-held phones or similar devices.
Lucy Amos, research advisor for Brake, said: “Distracted driving is a major cause behind road crashes; pulling the drivers’ attention away from the road and its potential hazards, potentially leading to fatal outcomes”. And talking in person involves non-verbal cues which ease the flow of conversation.
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And the more a conversation stimulates your visual imagination, inviting you to picture a scene, the more distracted you will be and the higher the likelihood of an accident, it says.
