Cellphones & Driving: Solving the Distraction Problem
The New York Times had a fantastic article today Drivers and Legislators Dismiss Cellphone Risks about the risks of driving while using a cellphone to make calls or send txt messages. Not to be under-emphasized is the incremental distraction risk other gadgets, such as GPS navigation, mp3 players, XM radio, and iPod docks, offer. Let’s take a brief look at some of the scientific research going into the problem:
The U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a series of papers, one of which, Association Between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions notes:
The risk of a collision when using a cellular telephone was four times higher than the risk when a cellular telephone was not being used. The relative risk was similar for drivers who differed in personal characteristics such as age and driving experience; calls close to the time of the collision were particularly hazardous; and units that allowed the hands to be free offered no safety advantage over hand-held units.
Another paper from the DoT, The Impact of Internal Distraction on Driver Visual Behavior highlights the hypothesis (yet to be tested in that forum) that increased complexity in processing non-visual stimuli leads to a direct reduction of visual processing ability:
It is known from past research (e.g., Miura, 1990) that patterns of visual search may be influenced by environmental complexity, such as that available in the road scene. There is also evidence that visual search behavior may be influenced, not only by the external environment, but also by factors internal to the person, such as the cognitive complexity of an ongoing task. Recently, Recarte & Nunes (2000) measured eye fixations while driving. They reported that drivers’ visual functional-field size was reduced (vertically and horizontally) when drivers performed a demanding cognitive task while driving.
According to the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, “the use of cell phones by drivers may result in approximately 2,600 deaths, 330,000 moderate to critical injuries, 240,000 minor injuries, and 1.5 million instances of property damage in America per year.” A particularly telling quote comes from University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer: “If you put a 20-year-old driver behind the wheel with a cell phone, their reaction times are the same as a 70-year-old driver who is not using a cell phone. It’s like instantly aging a large number of drivers.”
The problem seems to be quite simple: competing stimuluses rob our brains of the processing power to focus attention on driving, primarily a visual-motor task. The solution, I believe, comes from video games and the air force: HUD displays. If we can collapse all of the tasks we want to perform into a single visual field, motorists will be able to keep their focus on driving. There are lots of ways for technology to assist driving, if voice recognition can be used to direct navigation, with a display directly on the dash, if communications were built into the vehicle, and with additional range-sensing equipment to recognize and highlight obstacles and dangers.
BMW has already begun building heads-up-displays (HUD) into their cars:
Next-generation HUDs will wraparound the entire windshield and contain more, higher-density information. Cars should have the ability to highlight aspects of their surroundings and obstacles to the driver, or take corrective action in their own right. With a HUD to handle coherent output, and good voice-recognition to handle input, drivers will no longer be distracted by outside stimuluses when driving.
| This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is tagged with motor vehicle collisions, eye fixations, highway traffic safety, traffic safety administration, national highway traffic safety administration, ipod docks, national highway traffic, cognitive complexity, visual stimuli, harvard center, national highway traffic safety, visual behavior, safety advantage, cognitive task, search behavior, txt messages, visual search, relative risk, cellular telephone, external environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
I heard somewhere that driving while texting is just as bad as drunk driving. Though this same source said that there wasnt a big difference in accident rates ever since they made it a law to wear a bluetooth in california compared to before it was a law.