Put that mobile phone down! Driving & using phone is bad news
Mobile phones keep getting better by packing more functionality into a small form. But we’ve all come to expect that. The dangerous side? Not all of us choose the best time to use mobile phones, especially when accessing applications that require more eye contact. It’s an everyday occurrence, someone floating left or right, trying to drive in their lane with head tilted down and at least one hand pawing at a mobile phone.
Even speakerphones, which allow drivers to keep their eyes focused on the road compete for mindshare, and that means the driver has less attention available to process what’s happening on the road. At least when a real passenger is sitting in the car there’s a second set of eyes that could catch an upcoming road hazard early.
“The issue with cell phones is a concept called attention,” Dr. Christopher Colenda, the Jean and Thomas McMullin Dean of the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, told the Washington Post. “When you’re on the cell phone, it appears as though the process of talking with the cell phone may have an impact on one’s attention and ability to visualize what’s going on in the environment, because you are focused in on an abstract concept called the telephone.”
This sort of attention tug-of-war is played out every day and although a studied lab test helps validate the problem, it’s been a source of risk and frustration ever since mobile phones became mainstream.
Several drivers in the study passed their desired exit and only realized they’d missed a turn after hanging up the phone. It seems that multi-tasking is more like half-tasking in this case, with drivers shifting their attention to the phone conversation instead of “extending” their attention to both the device and the road.
There’s a broader lesson here, that it’s important to make decisions about what’s most worthy of your attention in any given circumstance. And that’s as relevant to getting work done while on the job as it is to driving safely.
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