Driving While Distracted More Dangerous Than Supposed

Science News reports on recent research indicating that any kind of multitasking while driving is dangerous. Not just the obvious distraction of juggling a cell phone, but even talking to a passenger or listening to a book on tape. The researchers used a driving simulator inside an MRI machine to measure brain activations. "Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior. This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit."

Comments

I have to disagree

[scire9]

because I'm driving right now while typing this post on my laptop and I'm not in the least bit distra

Re:I have to disagree

[JustShootMe]

Huh. I think someone just had an accident outside my apartment.

and why did that laptop just come flying through the window?

cted

Re:I have to disagree

[maxume]

It was awful nice of you to click on "Post" for him.

Re:I have to disagree

[nahdude812]

I have to disagree with at least one point for serious reasons.

I drove 3 hours a day for 4 years. About 6 months into this I started listening to books on tape, and I found my alertness level while driving was improved significantly. When I was just listening to the radio or my ipod, and it was the same stuff I've heard a thousand times before, my mind drifted. When I started keeping my mind awake and aware with audiobooks, I found I was surprised by traffic around me much less often.

I touted this to several coworkers who also had long drives, and collectively we all agreed: audiobooks keep your mind more active, and increase your overall awareness of arising traffic situations, we found ourselves in fewer close calls and surprised by things around us less often.

Re:I have to disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Post"-mortum button?

Re:I have to disagree

[somersault]

I thought that too, but I think he's made a good point. Perhaps his driving while listen to audio books is less attentive than it would be without for short journeys but on long monotonous journeys, your attention can just as easily wander, or you can get sleepy and your attention will be even worse than if your mind is being stimulated by more than just the driving. Personally, the only accidents (not serious ones, just bumper scuffles, two of which were shortly after I learned to drive, and one of which was about 5 minutes after I woke up.. :s ) I've had were when passengers were present. I do tend to rush more if I have passengers too, because I feel a responsibility to get people to their destination quickly, when I'm driving around town by myself I tend to chill out and just enjoy my music.

I do lots of observation while driving - frequent mirror checks at all 'hazards' (you should be checking your rearview mirror every 10 seconds anyway - that sounds like a lot but it isn't once you do it automatically, and it keeps you aware of what's going on around you in case you need to break suddenly or something like that). The checks are all pretty much built in now, I remember a few times that I've just stopped mid sentence while speaking to someone because I'm approaching a 'hazard' and need to concentrate more on my driving: I learned the police 'Roadcraft' System of Car Control on an advanced driving course a few months ago, and I highly recommend any such courses (mine included defensive driving, skid control and a more rigourous driving test than the standard UK driving test) to people to improve their driving and make even those times when you're driving on 'autopilot' safer.. though it's never really a good thing to let yourself drift into that kind of state while controlling over a ton of metal moving at speed!

Re:I have to disagree

[olyar]

Another way to look at this is to ask what was done in the study? Did they look at long trips, or just take short samples?

I was curious, so I went and read the article...

During one-minute virtual trips, participants listening to sentences drove onto the shoulder of the pavement or into the wrong lane 13 times on average, compared with 9 times on average for undisturbed drivers.

One minute trips!

Also take note of the fact that the participants were laying down and driving with a mouse. So pretty much this is nothing at all like driving.

After conducting a lame study like that, they concluded with some idle speculation:

Listening to talk radio or to spoken directions from a navigation system while driving probably have similar effects to what we found,â Just says. âoeMultitasking puts high demands on the brain.â

Yeah - um. Probably.

This was at Carnegie Mellon, and it's reported in what looks to be a respectable science magazine. Worse yet, this is the kind of stuff that drives public policy.

What a joke. Sorry to rant - you can look at my history and see it's not my usual MO. But sheesh. Come on.

Sound quality has an effect, yes/no?

[DeathAndTaxes]

I wonder if the quality of speech coming from the cell phone has anything to do with the amount of processing required. When people can't hear things very well, they start piecing together the dropped parts of the conversation by using some sort of contextual implication. You know what the subject is, so you have a good chance of surmising the dropped words due to context. I would think something similar could be possible for talk radio as well. I think if you listen to one talk show host consistently enough, you develop a better ability to understand what is being said, but a new talk show host can take some getting used to. Just some thoughts.

I can testify

[VeteranNoob]

When I'm driving with a passenger and conversing with them, I seem to only be able to actually focus on one of those tasks at a time.

If I am concentrating on the road, I've noticed that I tend to block out the passenger. Sometimes what the passenger says will get processed a good 5 seconds or so later when I'm in safer circumstances (straight driving in my lane). And if I'm instead thinking about what the occupant is saying, I will tend to miss turns that I know full well I need to take.

During any of this, however, I am driving fairly well. I have never had an accident in my 14 years on the road. But my brain is apparently focusing its full cognitive abilities on the road and traffic, but leaves little else to work with in that regard.

You can either tell me how your day went, or we can get to the restaurant. But they are somewhat mutually exclusive.

Listening to audio books.

[Anonymous Coward]

I listen to audio books while driving 3hr trips most weekends. What I know for sure is this: whenever there is a challenging bit of driving, I miss a large chunk of the audio book. This is not noticable with music...but with an audio book you can definitely tell that your attention switched to driving the car and not listening to the book because the story moved on and you know.

So I certainly agree with TFA that we can't multitask listening to speech and driving. But I think they are 100% wrong to assume that the driving (being the "newer" skill) is the thing that suffers. To the contrary - I think we're sufficiently adaptable to drop out the least important task.

That may be different with live humans (eg a passenger or cellphone) - but for audio books, TFA is clearly wrong.

Re:I'm all for a certain amount of regulation...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Banning regular cell-phone talk in cars is not going to do much to improve safety.

I'm blowing several moderations I've made to write this, but I think it has to be said: the research shows (beyond any reasonable doubt, and in plentiful quantities) that driving while using any mobile phone (hand-held or hands-free, the statistics are near-identical) is worse for safety than driving several times over the legal blood alcohol limit in most jurisdictions.

Now, you can act on this information in spectacularly the wrong way: the UK introduced a law to ban only hand-held phones, leading to the false impression that hands-free is safe and a rush of marketing implying that from hands-free vendors. The authorities then failed to enforce the new law anyway, to the extent that almost all drivers who admit to using a mobile illegally in studies also say it's because they don't think there's any serious risk of getting caught. That's hardly a deterrent, and in implicitly supporting the use of hands-free (which has near-identical danger stats, remember), if anything it has made things worse.

But there is no doubt that viewing use of a mobile phone while driving in the same socially unacceptable light as driving while drunk or high should be a good thing for road safety in the long run. Whether the correct answer to this is to make new laws, or simply to run a public awareness campaign to tell people the facts (how many people have you seen on Slashdot claiming, probably quite sincerely, that they can drive just fine while using a phone?), is open to debate.