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CELL PHONES 'BLIND' DRIVERS, STUDY SHOWS
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
Reuters / Washington Post
Monday, January 27, 2003

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51581-2003Jan27.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - 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. 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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