News and views from a software developer's perspective
Tuesday, January 28, 2003Can your cell phone impair your vision?. Talking to someone on a phone while driving gives you "tunnel vision" and reduces response time by about 20 percent, according to a new study. [CNET News.com]
This finding is something that always made sense to me. I know from listening to audio books while driving how this works. I could pay attention to the spoken words on the audio tape in "normal" traffic conditions, but when there was a situation where I had to pay closer attention to driving -- because I needed to change lanes in heavy traffic, for example -- that I would "miss" a portion of the tape. In fact, this happened frequently. I could listen to the audio book on tape, but I found that I had to rewind often to get the parts that I missed.
Talking on a cell phone, even on a hands-free device, is not like a normal conversation with some else in the car. A person who is also in the car, especially someone in the front seat, has the same road awareness as the driver. The conversation has the flexibility to adapt to the driving. When there is a cell phone conversation, one party is not present and has no road awareness. The conversation does not adapt, and the driver will "leave" the conversation from time to time to pay attention to the road. But because the other party to the conversation has no road awareness, the driver may be more reluctant to leave the conversation, and I think that is where the tunnel vision problem arises.
