Hands-Free Driving Experiment

Have you ever been on a road driving and pass a driver who is talking on the phone sans hands-free device? The government has considered the action reckless enough to create legislation that bans the use of cell phone devices that aren’t hands-free. You have a hand-free device and take calls freely, do you think your probability of getting into an accident is less likely than that of an individual who isn’t using a hands-free device? Well, you’ll be interested to know that a study conducted in the University of Utah by Strayer & et. al. has found that engaging participants in a conversation, using a hands-free device, reduces driving performance such that the conversation diverts attention from the external environment to the engaging context of the conversation. Researchers designed experiments that assessed the effects of talking on a hand-free device on driving performance, participant’s used a driving simulator to gauge performance. …show more content…
The time between when the car in front braked and when the participants braked was measured. Compared to individuals who were not engaged in a conversation, those who were talking took longer to brake. Overall, participants who were engaged in a conversation were more sluggish to break and had a greater likelihood of rear-ending the vehicle in front of them. This driving impairment increased, respectively, as car density (i.e. traffic) increased. The second experiment assessed how cellular conversations while driving affected attention to objects encountered in the driving scenery (i.e. billboards). Participants were asked to do a simulated drive, and then asked to identify objects that had and had not been in the driving scene. Researchers found that conversations disrupt driving performance by diverting attention away from the external environment. Results indicated that participants engaged in a conversation identified fewer objects