Research into hands-free mobile calls whilst driving
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I read the research of Dr Melina Kunar from the the University of Warwickshire and Todd Horowitz of the Harvard Medical School into "Hands free mobile phone conversations add 5 metres to drivers' braking distances":
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As the lead researcher in the project, Melina's research unearthed new findings relating to hands-free mobile calls and driving:
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Photo: Melina Kunar's research intohands-free mobile calls and driving
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"The researchers found that on average the reaction times of those engaging in the hands free telephone conversation were 212 milliseconds slower than those who undertook the task without the simultaneous telephone conversation. A car travelling at 60 miles an hour would travel 5.7 metres (18.7 feet) in that time so the distracting conversation would obviously increase any braking distance at that speed by the same amount. The test participants who were distracted by a phone conversation also made 83% more errors in the task than those not in phone conversations.
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"The researchers found that on average the reaction times of those engaging in the hands free telephone conversation were 212 milliseconds slower than those who undertook the task without the simultaneous telephone conversation. A car travelling at 60 miles an hour would travel 5.7 metres (18.7 feet) in that time so the distracting conversation would obviously increase any braking distance at that speed by the same amount. The test participants who were distracted by a phone conversation also made 83% more errors in the task than those not in phone conversations.
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"The researchers also looked at the effect the hands free telephone conversations had on visual attention if the phone conversation was skewed to a more passively orientated task. To do so they asked the test participants to listen over the speaker phones to a series of words and to repeat each word in turn. The research team also looked at the effect of a much more complicated conversational task in which the test participants had to listen to a series of words and after each word then think of and say a new word which began with the last letter of the word they had just heard.
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"Our research shows that simply using phones hands free is not enough to eliminate significant impacts on a driver’s visual attention. Generating responses for a conversation competes for the brain’s resources with other activities which simply cannot run in parallel. This leads to a cognitive "bottleneck" developing in the brain, particularly with the more complicated task of word generation."
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It is the finding of "bottleneck" (causation) that struck me as significant, for would that still be the case of causation where a car passenger engages in conversation with the driver of a car? An article in the Economist titled 'Driving and mobile phones. Just shut up, will you'. Dec 4th 2008 appears to answer this question:
At the University of Utah research into "chatting to passengers have the same detrimental effect on driving? An earlier study found that it does not. That research, led by Frank Drews of the University of Utah, analysed the performance of young drivers using a vehicle simulator. Dr Drews found that when using a hands-free phone, a volunteer “drove” significantly worse than he did when just talking to someone playing the role of a passenger. Passengers, the researchers believed, might even help road safety by commenting on surrounding traffic."
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