TALKING WHILE DRIVING SAFEST WITH SOMEONE WHO CAN SEE WHAT YOU SEE
A new study offers
fresh insights into how talking on a cell phone or to a passenger while driving
affects one's performance behind the wheel. The study used a driving simulator
and videophone to assess how a driver's conversation partner influences safety
on the road.
"We've done
years of study on driver distraction, and previous studies suggest that
passengers often aren't distracting. In fact, passengers can be helpful,
especially if they're adults who have had experience and also are active
drivers themselves," said University of Illinois psychology professor and
Beckman Institute director Arthur Kramer, who led the research with
postdoctoral fellow Kyle Mathewson and graduate student John Gaspar. Mathewson
is now a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta.
The researchers hoped
to discover which aspects of talking to a passenger most affect a driver's
performance -- rather than talking to someone on a cell phone, which is often
dangerous. To do this, they set up four driving scenarios: a driver alone in
the simulator, a driver speaking to a passenger in the simulator, a driver
speaking on a hands-free cell phone to someone in a remote location, and a
driver speaking on a hands-free cell phone to someone in a remote location who
could see the driver and observe the driving scene out the front windshield via
videophone.
The drivers (all
participants were college-age students) confronted a fairly challenging highway
scene that involved merging and navigating around unpredictable drivers in
other cars. The researchers kept track of the study drivers' lateral moves,
distance from other cars, speed, collisions, and ability to find and take a
designated exit.
"We also
recorded their speech as they talked to their partner in three out of the four
conditions, and we looked at where they looked -- we had an eye tracker built
into the simulator," Kramer said. "So it was a pretty rich data set."
Driving alone was the
safest option, the researchers found, in line with previous research. There
were significantly fewer collisions when drivers were alone in the simulated
car than when they spoke to a passenger in the car with them. Passengers helped
drivers find their exits and improved their memory of road signs, but they
detracted from overall safety (avoidance of collisions), Kramer said.
As expected,
speaking to someone on a cell phone while driving was the most dangerous of the
conditions. Talking to someone who had no awareness of what was going on inside
or outside the car more than tripled the likelihood of a collision, the
researchers found.
The most interesting
results, however, involved the fourth driving scenario -- when a driver spoke
to someone who was not in the car but who could observe the driver's face and
the view out the front windshield on a videophone.
"Drivers were
less likely to be involved in a collision when their remote partner could see
what they were seeing," Gaspar said. "And this benefit seems to be
driven by changes in the way partners talked to the driver."
Seeing the driver
and watching what was going on in traffic during the conversation allowed the
non-driving partner to stop speaking, for example, when something unexpected
occurred on the road, or to point out a situation that might be dangerous,
Gaspar said.
"Conversations
with a partner on the videophone were very similar to conversations with a
passenger," he said.
The findings
demonstrate that a passenger or conversation partner can contribute
significantly to the safety of the driving experience, Kramer said. If that
person knows what's going on in the car, he or she can stop talking or draw the
driver's attention to specific road conditions. While this is not safer for the
driver than driving alone or in silence, it is safer than when the driver is
speaking on a cell phone to someone who doesn't know what's going on in and
around the car, he said.
"There is no
condition in which having the videophone information is worse than speaking on
a cell phone; the collisions are reduced 40 or 50 percent -- that's pretty
big," Kramer said. "I'm not suggesting people speak on cell phones
while driving, but if the driver is speaking to someone who is not in the car,
it would be helpful for the conversation partner to have information about what
the driver is seeing and doing."
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