Jack McVicker
12/9/10
Cell phone driving failures
I. Introduction
Cell phones have changed tremendously in this last decade, and their impact on the way we act has changed also. Cell phones have evolved and changed our everyday actions. Driving while talking on the phone has lead to twice as many accidents than people who do not talk on the phone while driving. They started to pay attention to this in 2003 when the University of Utah and the Warwick Department of Physiology did a field study of drivers that were using hands free phones.

II. Discovery
A group of drivers were asked to drive on a test course, some with a hands free phone, others with no distraction. The ones that were engaged with the phone carried on with a basic conversation talking about hobbies and interests. They found that the participants that were taking part in hands free conversation had a reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who did not participate in conversation. The participants distracted by phone conversation also made 84% more errors. This shows that using hands free phones does not eliminate the visual distractions of driving with cell phones. This study suggests that hands free phone conversations that require us to consider information we are being given and make complex cognitive choices based on that information have a very negative impact on a driver’s ability to process and act on the visual information given that is critical to their driving performance.


III. Biography
Melina Kunar:
Melina has put her entire career into studying visual distractions and attention. Dr. Kunar has tried to state that advancements in technology mean that people are able to do more tasks concurrently. But just because they can multi-task does not mean they should. Take the example of driving and talking on a mobile phone. Many daily tasks involve visual search, making it an important focus of research. Melina’s research investigates how people visually attend and search different types of scenes. In particular Dr. Kunar is interested in Visual Marking, Contextual Cueing and understanding and improving search performance when the target only appears rarely. She also researches in when performing two tasks concurrently helps attentional performance and when it hinders it.

IV. Impact on the World
The impact that these statistics and studies have made on the world is large, but not large enough. Some states have banned cell phones while driving, but permit hands free calling. And some states choose to ignore these facts about being on the phone while driving. The impact that researchers like Dr. Melina Kunar have made will continue to grow with time because everybody will soon start to realize the devastating effects of cell phones while driving. These studies on visual performance have been overlooked by too many and although they have the proof to stop cell phone use while driving people are choosing to ignore it.

V. Journal Article
This research from the article examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on simulated drivers. David Strayer, Frank Drews, and William Johnston found that these conversations impaired driver’s reactions to vehicles braking in front of them. The authors of the article assessed whether this impairment could be attributed to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene around them, giving way to a form of inattention blindness. Cell phone conversations impaired the drivers recognition memory for roadside billboards. Eye-tracking data indicated that this was due to reduced attention to foveal information.

VI. Resources
1. http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leon/409as2006/wong/visualattention.pdf

2. http://www.medindia.net/news/Talking-on-Mobile-Phones-While-Driving-can-Seriously-Impair-Drivers-Visual-Attention-44807-1.htm

3. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/