Laura's Research Summary 3
Effects on Cognition During an Audio or Visual Stimulus Laura Penrod
Currently my group is in the last stages of researching our topics and I believe that we all have valid and great points. As I changed my general topic from just phones ringing to cell phone use while driving I found more and more articles that helped with my point. I really wanted to find more articles with studies about texting and driving but I was unable to. Which I believe is because texting is relatively new and it will take some time before studies are published. My first article was titled Listening to Cell Phones Impairs Driving, Study. Scientist in the U.S. have shown that even just listening to a cell phone can cause enough distraction to cause drivers to make the same type of driving errors as they would under the influence of alcohol. This is one of the first articles to use a study that looked at not just talking on a cell phone but just listening to a cell phone alone. Experimenters asked volunteers to drive on a simulator while their brains were being observed by a MRI machine. The results were that just listening alone reduced brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent. My second study was titled Collision and Violation Involvement of Drivers Who Use Cellular Telephones. They used an observational survey. They had 42 different locations in the Greater Vancouver Regional District. They observed during the daylight hours from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. from August 18th to September 2nd and 95% of those observations were made during the weekday. They waited until a vehicle approached with a driver using a handheld cellular telephone. When a driver did approach the observer wrote down that driver’s license plate number, driver’s gender, and estimated age. They then wrote down the next eligible vehicle approaching from the same direction with a driver not using a cell phone, for the nonuser sample. Their findings were that the drivers that had been observed using cell phones while driving have a greater risk of an at-fault collision, that risk is also higher for females using a cell phone than males using a cell phone. “These cell phone users have more violations for speeding, impaired driving, seat belt nonuse, aggressive driving, and nonmoving violations.” (Wilson, et al. 2003) My third study was titled Driven to Distraction: Dual-Task Studies of Simulated Driving and Conversing on a Cellular Telephone. It was a study conducted by one of the same men that conducted a study in my previous summary, David L. Strayer. Strayer and Johnston conducted two experiments. They were dual task studies involving cell phones and driving. The first experiment was designed to test the differences between hand-held and hands-free cell-phones. It had 48 undergrad students (24 male and 24 female) who were 18-34 years old who were randomly assigned to three groups; radio control, handheld phone, and hands-free phone. They used a joystick to maneuver a cursor on a computer. The findings of this study were like his other study, Cell-Phone Induced Driver Distraction. They found that while a person was using a hand-held or hands-free phone their ability to detect simulated traffic signals and signs decreased twofold. The second experiment involved shadowing. The participant performed the simulated driving task while repeating words that the experimenter read to them over a handheld phone. They also had to perform a word-generation task. The participant had to say words that began with the last letter of the word the experimenter said. The finding of this experiment was not surprising, “tracking error increased when participants used the cell phone to perform an active, attention-demanding word-generation task but not when they performed a shadowing task.” (Strayer 2001) Like the other studies I have found their main finding was that cell-phones interrupt our “performance by diverting our attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.” (Strayer 2001). From a cognitive perspective I believe that these articles have great relevance to understanding our topic. In class we talked about how our brains can only focus our attention on one demanding task. We have a hard time reading a book while watching T.V. because our brain cannot filter out the T.V. noise because our attention is usually drawn to it. The findings of the studies I found prove our point that visual and auditory stimulus are distracting to our cognitive process. With the articles I found it shows that even with recent technological advances driving while using a cell phone is still dangerous. Our brains can only focus on one demanding task, such as driving. It is however easy to focus on driving if you’re listening to music because listening to music is not a demanding task. Our group does not need to explore anything else. I believe that we have sufficiently found enough articles that help all of our points that we as humans are naturally distracted and when you add an outside stimulus it only weakens our ability to focus. My group has great focus and great points and I believe that we definitely understand our individual topics.
Work Cited
Paddock, Catharine. (2008) Listening To Cell Phones Impairs Driving, Study. Retrieved April 20, 2008, from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99696.php.
Strayer, David L. & Johnston, William A. (2001). Driven Distraction: Dual Task Studies of Simulated Driving and Conversing on a Cellular Telephone. Psychological Science, 12(6), 462-466.
Wilson, Jean, Fang, Ming, Wiggins, Sandra, & Cooper, Peter. (2003). Collision and Violation Involvement of Drivers Who Use Cellular Telephones. Traffic Injury Prevention, 4(1), 45-52.
